FORGET POLITICS and religion. You think the insurmountable divisions are between liberals and conservatives, Palestinians and Israelis, low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets? Nope. The real division, the line in the sand that counts, concerns raisins. The conflict in the Middle East or Northern Ireland is nothing compared to a raisin hater faced with a raisin lover.

Actually, the term "raisin lover" is probably a misnomer. People who like raisins never seem to be quite as ardent in their taste for raisins as raisin haters are in their abhorrence. I know. I'm firmly on the side of those who despise the nasty little fruits.

To be precise, I have to say that it's mostly the texture of raisins that I detest. I don't dislike the taste of raisins at all, really. Give me a late harvest zinfandel wine or a raisiny port and I'm fine. Perhaps even stranger, I don't particularly loathe plain raisins on any grounds. I don't go out of my way to eat them, but they're not that bad. I would much rather eat raisins than, say, blue cheese or insects. (Blue cheese is the other thing I really hate; once my sister found a recipe for a blue cheese souffle made with a raisin bread crust, and sent it to me. So terribly amusing, my sister is.)

But add raisins to food, any food, and all bets are off. Raisins are vile and loathsome in any dish at all, sweet or savory -- tiny desiccated Dr. Jekylls that, when added to innocent cinnamon rolls, turn into plump, slimy, nasty Mr. Hydes. I spent my childhood picking raisins out of spice cookies (my mother finally started making a portion of each batch without them after I fed so many raisins to the dog she became ill), sweet rolls, and cinnamon toast; I know what baking does to them. They should not be baked. They especially should not be soaked in brandy or rum and then baked (the true definition of "alcohol abuse"). Nuts and raisins together in baked goods are particularly evil; it goes without saying that fruitcake should be banned by Geneva Convention.

And Raisinets? The spawn of Satan. Raisins should never touch chocolate. End of story.

Imagine my dismay when I got a little older and more adventurous and found out that some cooks add raisins to savory dishes. My college roommate loved raisins. Fortunately, she never tried to bake anything. But she put raisins in fruit salad; I picked them out. She added raisins to rice; I picked them out. I thought it was the idiosyncrasy of a bad cook. Little did I know that she was not alone in this barbarism.

The only thing worse than regulation raisins are sultanas (the golden variety), because they blend in like undercover agents. You'll be eating a nice saffron imbued rice pilaf, and suddenly -- squish -- there's an albino raisin in your mouth. And picking them out is hard work, as they can hide. (Note to raisin lovers: if you have to use them, stick with the regular kind -- they're much easier to recover and destroy.)

And here's what really bothers me about raisins: they always seem to be in dishes that -- except for that blue cheese souffle thing, of course -- I would otherwise really like. I love curries, I love Middle Eastern foods, and I love cinnamon rolls. These things should not contain raisins. You want to add raisins to ambrosia? To Jello? Fine. But please, please don't pollute my couscous. And, whichever chef first added raisins to chicken salad should be forced to spend eternity watching Emeril reruns while sitting next to Rachel Ray.

I try to be understanding, generous. I don't think people who put raisins in food are being deliberately malicious. But I'd like to know, honestly, why they do it. Really, think about it. Would you miss those little dried grapes if you didn't add them to the carrot cake, those cookies, or that chicken salad? What can they possibly add, besides a virtually indiscernible touch of flavor and little pockets of squishy stickiness?

And yet I know that it's impossible to make a non-hater understand just how repulsive the little things are. People who like raisins look at me as if I'm crazy when I try to describe why I don't. I suppose it's no different with anything else. I have a friend, for instance, who hates celery. This is inexplicable to me. How can you hate celery? It's so, so innocuous. Isn't it?

But undoubtedly that's what other people say about raisins. Except that they're wrong. Raisins have one legitimate use, and that is for Amarone wine. Aside from that, keep them away from me

Janet A. Zimmerman (JAZ) writes about food and teaches cooking classes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently working on a book, Matters of Taste.

"Go down east and it's quiet," Jack Tapp says of North Carolina’s coastal plain, where the land is a checkerboard of agricultural fields. "There's nothing natural that flies anymore." Tapp works 16 hours a day, six days a week running a Chapel Hill-based apiary with a thousand beehives. Only a few decades ago, farmers could rely on wild bees and other insects to pollinate their crops. Now that wild bees have all but disappeared, beekeepers like Tapp play an increasingly important role in putting food on our tables. Bees are responsible, directly or indirectly, for every third bite of food Americans eat: $15 billion worth of food each year. Trouble is, Tapp and many like him worry beekeepers are disappearing, too.

Tapp didn't set out to be a commercial beekeeper. Retired from work as an aeronautical engineer, a test pilot, and a sheriff's detective, he decided to keep a few hives as a hobby. One day he got a call from an agricultural official. "I hear you've got twenty hives. I've got a small blueberry farmer down south, and he needs twenty hives. The larger beekeepers won't touch him." Tapp loaded up his bees and drove to the North Carolina - South Carolina border.

Now in his mid-60s, Tapp owns one of North Carolina's thirteen largest commercial apiaries. Of those, eleven owners are at least 60 years old. Tapp's wife helps him with his business, along with two men who are both Tapp's age or older. The three men work building and repairing hives, extracting honey, and loading 80-pound hives full of bees onto trucks so they can be taken to fields. Their ages are not unusual among beekeepers: seventy percent of America's beekeepers are over 45. Many are retired.

During my visit to Tapp’s apiary just outside Chapel Hill, I asked him, "I'm wondering, does fifteen billion dollars worth of food a year depend on a bunch of retired hobbyists?"

I fully expected him to tell me I was exaggerating. Tapp turned his head, looked me in the eye and with a straight face said, "Well, yeah."

There are about 125,000 beekeepers in the United States. More than ninety percent do it as a hobby; eight percent are sideliners, people who keep bees as a part-time business. Only 600 are commercial beekeepers with a thousand hives or more. Some of those are migratory, spending the better part of the year on the road, moving as crops bloom. Farmers typically pay anywhere from $35 to $60 to rent a hive of bees during bloom; most crops need at least one hive per acre.

Even among commercial beekeepers, there's quite a bit of gray hair. Dan Conlon, who owns Warm Colors Apiary in Massachusetts, says, "you go to these meetings, if you're 50, you're young." Conlon and many others worry about the future of beekeeping: with few young people getting into the business, beekeepers wonder if their skills and experience will be lost. Beekeeping isn't the most attractive career, and not just because of the insect stings: the costs are high, the risks are great, and the lifestyle can be hard on family.

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Besides honey, bees are perhaps best known for pollinating. They work more than ninety different food crops. Some of those are very dependent on bees just to produce anything; bees help others yield better results. Citrus trees don’t need insects to set fruit, but $504 million worth of oranges a year can be attributed to bees -- enough of a difference that Florida growers rent hives.

Bees don’t just pollinate your food, they pollinate food for your food. Alfalfa and clover, both cattle feed, need to be pollinated in order to produce seeds for the next year's crop. California alfalfa growers bring in honeybees to do the job. Bees, then, are an important link in dairy and beef production.

Bees also make fruit and vegetables more perfect by impacting shape and size. With commercial demand for uniformity, growers put a lot of trust in bees to turn a profit. While it may take only one night and a single sperm to produce a human being, perfect fruit doesn't happen in a solitary encounter.

Jack Tapp says he can guarantee a 300 percent increase in strawberry volume with just one hive of honeybees per acre. Each time a bee pollinates a strawberry flower it creates a seed. The berry must then develop the flesh to support each new seed. More bee visits create bigger berries.

Cucumber growers are heavily dependent upon bees for perfection. Cucumbers and melons need insects to reproduce; the pollen grains are too heavy and sticky for wind to do the job. Bees must visit a flower a minimum of nine times to produce a cuke, and a minimum of thirteen times to get a perfect one, the kind that fits nicely into pickle jars and makes a farmer money. (Gherkins make the most.) If a blossom is inadequately pollinated, the cucumber will be deformed: too short, large on one end and small on the other, or curved. Bottom line, a deformed cucumber doesn't make a pretty pickle or top dollar, and can only be sold for products like relish.

Almond growers are just as dependent upon bees, and it is the almond industry appearing in headlines most these days when it comes to bees. California produces 100 percent of the US commercial almond supply and 80 percent of the world's almonds. Two years ago, when the American Beekeeping Federation estimated half the bee colonies in California died over the winter, panic ensued. Keepers imported bees from Australia just to meet demand. Rental fees shot up to $80 a hive, and as much as $120 at the last minute. Keepers reported stolen hives, with at least one losing tens of thousands of dollars overnight. Some growers hired patrols. Thefts not only hurt the beekeeper, but the almond orchards where the bees are working. Bloom, the window of pollinating opportunity, only lasts about three weeks, with each flower open for three to five days. And it takes time to get bees.

No cattle rancher could survive a fifty percent loss in livestock without assistance, and beekeepers are finding it just as difficult to manage with their livestock losses. Some are getting out of the business.

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Bees get ready for winter by storing food, kicking out male bees, and sealing the hive. (Male bees don't do any work, and so they are a drain on resources.) Bees survive the winter by clustering together and shivering their wings. One tiny bee's shivering wings might not make much difference, but together, 50,000 bees can produce a lot of heat. It can be below freezing outside, but the inside of a hive will remain above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The bees slowly move through the hive as they consume their honey.

Winter can be a particularly anxious time for a beekeeper. Opening the hive could jeopardize the colony's survival, so the keeper must be content with a hands-off approach. Beekeepers have come to expect some winter loss; sometimes the bees can't get to a frame of honey and they starve to death. Hungry bears destroy hives. The worst threat to honeybees in the past twenty years is much smaller: the mite. Two types made their way to the US in the mid-80s. One type, trachea mites, attach themselves to a bee's tracheal tubes, making it difficult for the bee to breathe.

Bee breeders are able to help fight problems like this by breeding bees to possess certain traits. For example, honeybees are bred to be gentle, to be better pollinators, and to resist the impulse to swarm. Breeders have been able to combat the trachea mites in part by breeding bees to use better hygiene. By keeping themselves clean, the bees can help keep themselves free of trachea mites.

Varroa mites are the worst of the two parasites. Nicknamed "vampire mites," they literally suck the life out of bees. A keeper can open a hive at winter's end and find tens of thousands of dead bees inside. Varroa mites are responsible for the massive losses in California. Across the United States, beekeepers lost thirty to fifty percent of their colonies in 2004. Mites, along with pesticides used in farming, have wiped out North America’s wild honeybees. Breeders are working on genetics to develop bees that are resistant to mites, but that takes time and generations of bees. Scientists have come up with chemical treatments to medicate bees, but some render drones infertile. In recent years, scientists have discovered the mites are developing resistance to the drugs.

For thousands of years, bees managed to thrive without human help. Now more than ever, bees need caretakers to help them survive their fight against their most devastating enemy. Trouble is, the same mites draining the life out of bees have had a similar impact on their keepers.

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Full-time commercial apiaries make up less than five percent of America's beekeepers, yet they own fifty percent of domesticated honeybees. Most of them are family-run businesses. As Massachusetts beekeeper Dan Conlon says, "it's too much work to not be family."

Conlon is quite busy himself. Through Warm Colors Apiary, he and his wife, Bonita, produce honey, provide pollination services, sell beekeeping equipment, and teach classes. Upon finishing the course, Conlon's graduates are ready to start their own hives. Come springtime, Conlon headed to Mt. Vernon, Georgia to pick up bees for his students and other clients. (Many northern beekeepers lose their bees over the winter, so they depend on southern beekeepers to supply them with bees.)

Conlon's supplier is Jon Hardimon, a queen breeder whose career has spanned six decades. The Hardimons recognize Dan when he pulls up, and they know he's got a long road ahead of him. Even though other beekeepers have been waiting for days, the Hardimons will "shake" Dan's bees first.

Shaking bees is exactly what it sounds like. Hardimon recruits strong, young people for this job; it's hard on the knees. The workers lift 80- to 100- pound hive bodies and physically shake them over small wood boxes with screens on two sides. The bees tumble through a funnel into these packages. Each one holds three to four pounds of bees. The package is finished with a punctured can of corn syrup -- food for the bees on their trip -- and a small cage that holds a queen and her attendants. The men shaking the bees work from dawn to dusk; they will work 12- to 16-hour days from the beginning of spring until June.

Conlon and Hardimon talk business. When Hardimon started, keeping bees was easier. The greatest worry then was a bacterial disease called foulbrood. "Now, people new to beekeeping have a much steeper learning curve," Conlon said. Conlon says keepers who didn't follow the rules are to blame for the quick spread of mites in the United States; with little regulation, mites spread throughout the country in a matter of months on the trucks of migratory keepers. The impact was so disastrous, even the best keepers couldn't keep a colony alive for more than a few years. 30 years ago, the government counted 200,000 beekeepers in the U.S., with more than 4 million hives. Now there are 38 percent fewer beekeepers managing 2.4 million hives. (The number of hives has been steadily declining for almost 60 years; in 1947 the US had 6 million hives.) Many experienced keepers quit in frustration, including a significant number of people who specialized in breeding queens. In Conlon’s words, the industry lost a lot of collective brainpower.

When the Hardimons finish loading Conlon's bees, the clock starts ticking. The bees can survive only a few days at most in packages; they need new homes. Conlon and his wife drive 24 hours straight, hauling 2400 pounds of bees in a pickup truck and a makeshift trailer. He uses digital thermometers to keep a close eye on them. Conlon can stand in front of his truck and feel the heat coming off. In the center of the mass of packages, the temperature could reach 130 degrees -- hot enough to literally cook the bees. He controls this by pulling over at a rest stop occasionally to spray the bees down with water. Conlon says he used to apologize to people who gave him strange looks. Now he just waters his bees and keeps going.

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Money, or lack of it, can keep a hobbyist from becoming a commercial beekeeper. It takes an investment of about $200,000 to start with 300 hives, and most of that is infrastructure. Each hive costs about $200, including bees. "Most young people don't have that kind of money, or don't have access to it," said Jack Tapp, who is a vocal advocate for bees and keepers in North Carolina. Low interest loans aren't typically available to beekeepers. "Every cent of it is a risk," Tapp said. "The banks want land or something in collateral. A bee isn't good collateral." Three hundred hives aren't really enough for a commercial beekeeper to turn a profit. The margins are thin, and the first real profit comes in slowly: a beekeeper can't survive off pollination rentals alone, and it takes time to produce and harvest honey.

David Tarpy is an entomologist at North Carolina State University, and much of his work helps support beekeepers. He notes the government doesn’t give beekeepers the same financial resources it gives farmers. "The government says beekeeping is not an agricultural enterprise. It assists agriculture."

Just how much assistance bees provide is a recently hard-learned lesson in North Carolina. Historically, tobacco has been the state's primary crop, but after the tobacco settlement, legislators encouraged growers to get into other crops. What the legislators overlooked, though, was that the farmers would need bees to pollinate those new crops. "Thousands of acres didn't get pollinated because there weren't enough bees," Jack Tapp said.

In 2004, Tarpy secured a grant from the non-profit Golden Leaf Foundation to help increase the number of beekeepers in the state. The cost-sharing program provides mentoring and two hives of bees to 250 new beekeepers. More than 2800 people applied, including farmers who wanted to start keeping bees for their own crops. Even people with a few hives, Tarpy says, have a significant impact on pollination. Hobbyists own half the domestic bees in the nation and produce forty percent of America’s honey.

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The morning after Dan Conlon returned to Massachusetts with a ton of bees, he and his wife get up early, preparing for students to pick up their bees. By 9:00am, there is a small crowd standing around a shed as Conlon marks queens with paint so new keepers can easily find them. Some escapees are buzzing around his head, landing on his clothes, in his hair, and on his fingers as he works. Conlon doesn't seem to notice they're there. In the afternoon, Conlon's class sits on the ground around an empty hive body for their last lesson: how to install a bee package.

Conlon's three dozen students are a diverse group, with just as many women as there are men, many of them in their 20s and 30s. They have their own reasons for getting into beekeeping: some for honey, some for their gardens, some because they want to support the environment. Some are interested in apitherapy, the practice of using bee venom to relieve arthritis and other conditions. One woman says the charmer in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes inspired her.

Conlon takes the queen cage out of the package and gently lays it aside. Then Conlon gives the package a shake, and a cluster of bees rolls into the super (a wooden box) that will be their new home. More bees fly into the air, circling around his head and the students on the ground. No one flinches or waves them away. There are still some bees in the package, which Conlon sets aside.

Conlon reinforces lessons he's taught throughout his time with this class. He shows them organic methods to help control varroa mites. "If you do nothing, you'll probably lose your bees at some point," he tells them. Conlon, though, doesn't advocate excessive use of chemical treatments. He encourages his students to think long-term. One of his goals is to help rebuild a native sustainable bee population. It may take generations, but over time, descendants of the queens from Georgia will build colonies with the strength to survive the Massachusetts climate; bees may even develop resistance to mites. "Strong colonies can medicate and heal themselves," Conlon says.

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Just a few decades ago, the beekeeper's main message to the general public was to limit use of pesticides. Now, keepers like Jack Tapp believe people need to be even more aware of honeybees and the people who keep them. Cutting back on pesticides in the garden, or finding organic alternatives, is a part of it. "People will have to choose," Tapp says. When he was young, food didn't have to be perfect in order to be acceptable. "If there was an apple with a yellowjacket [bite], you just ate around it."

Tapp says another solution is to encourage more people to keep bees as a hobby. Tarpy says two states are taking a good look at the North Carolina cost-assistance program as a model. Classes can be found in every state, and hobbyists live in the country, the burbs, and urban areas. There are beekeepers in New York City, with hives on rooftops.

Bees and humans have had a beneficial relationship for thousands of years. Without new, stronger generations of bees and keepers, we'll all feel the sting. "Where it'll hit is in the grocery store," Tapp says. "Soon people will be paying two dollars for a cucumber if we're not careful."

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Shaun Chavis (aka shaunchavis) is a soulful Southerner back home in Alabama after a spell living up North, where she finished a Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy at Boston University. She awaits the acceptance of her thesis. She's spent most of her life in newsrooms and kitchens.

I'm alone in a rowboat in a howling Nor'Easter, provisioned with nothing but a bottle of Molson Ex and a bag of marshmallows. Twenty years of cooking magazines are acting as ballast, but the boat's taking on water and I'm forced to jettison my collection. What goes over the bow first?

As a recurring nightmare it can't compete with the one where I'm trying to catch a plane to Oslo to pick up my Nobel, only to find that my shoes don't match, my passport has expired, and I've forgotten my speech in the taxi. But faced with the laws of physics, the linear feet of available shelf space and the ever-expanding cookbook collection, I'm bailing out the boat at least once a year.

Sorry, Martha, over you go, just from sheer weight. I'm sure you ace the swimming portion of the Iron Man, and my complete series of Martha Stewart Living has already been eroded, standing in for sand as the leveling agent under the patio bricks. I can find your recipe for piped peapods on the bookshelf or at marthastewart.com. Besides, I'm hanging on to you because I still yearn to craft a complete collection of State Birds entirely from pompoms. (Lest you think that burial under the bricks is a sign of masculine disrespect, my husband adores Martha, and would have served her five months in a flash had she put him on her calendar for an assignation featuring pumpkin carving. She's blonde, she can cook and after watching her tour Steinway and Sons, he's convinced that she can rebuild a nine-foot grand faster than even he.)

Gourmet. Groan. Every other year a mutable pair of adorable nine-year-olds comes to the door, selling magazine subscriptions to raise money for Brownies or soccer camp or Missions to Mongolia. Sigh. Of course I submit, and choose Gourmet. What compels my caving? There's always that single irresistible recipe I want to save, so I add another month to the stack waiting for that rainy-day clipping party that never happens. Come to think of it, I can always consult Epicurious.com. Sorrow is cold comfort Ruth; you're going over the bow.

I shake a dozen blow-in subscription cards from a random copy of Bon Appetit. Here again, Epicurious is my friend. Reserving a card to be inscribed later with a plea for rescue -- which I'll stuff into the empty Molson bottle -- I toss the rest, along with five years' worth of endless holiday tips, into the drink.

For five years, we had unlimited access to the dumpster of America's leading importer of foreign periodicals. That was truly the Golden Age of magazine madness: piles of Paris-Match, Country Life and Madame Figaro obscured the coffee table, the carpet, and the tops of toilet tanks. The Italian cooking magazines were by mille miglia the most beautiful, and I saved (and still cook from) dozens of them. But: I cough into my saltwater-soaked hanky, channel Violetta in the last act of La Traviata, and watch Sale e Pepe, A Tavola and La Cucina Italiana sail away. Quel dolor.

After the operatic catharsis, I manage to pitch a near complete set of Cook's Illustrated, senza lagrima. Thanks for cooking up the compilations, Christopher; the boat's another foot higher in the water. I nibble the last marshmallow -- and prepare to go down with the boat, the beer, and twenty-five issues of Pleasures of Cooking.

I will go to my watery grave with Carl Sontheimer.

The Man

By now, I should expect it. Along with those other culinary crushes of mine, de Pomiane and Babinski, Sontheimer was a Science Guy first, a Food Guy second -- I gleaned most of his biographical information at the website of his alma mater, MIT. He was born in New York City in 1914, but spent most of his youth in France before heading stateside to go to college. He was a Mechanical Engineer, inventor and entrepreneur with a passion for microwave -- the frequency, not the oven -- and he sold a direction finder to NASA, who deployed it on a mission to the moon. As a tribute to his ingenuity, MIT has established the Carl G. Sontheimer Prize for Excellence in Innovation and Creativity in Design. (Don't confuse this with the <a href="http://www.ttnews.com/members/topNews/0002379.html"> Sontheimer Award</a>, which honors "The driver who best exemplifies all the attributes that make up the professional truck driver.") He sold his engineering company and could have spent the rest of his life bumming around La Belle France in considerable style, munching through every star in Michelin.

You can take the engineer out of the country, but you can't take the engineer out of the rich retired gourmet entrepreneur. In 1971, Carl and his wife attended a culinary trade show in France. In a coup de foudre, he fell in love with the monstre mechanique of the French professional kitchen, the Robo Coupe. He bought a licensing agreement and tinkered with the bulky behemoth, downsizing it for home use. In 1973, he delivered its docile domesticated offspring, the Cuisinart. To paraphrase Carole King, the earth moved under our clogs.

The Machine

The Cuisinart is a fixture now, a standard item on the bridal registry, like a covey of canisters or an electronic foot spa. Typical is the daughter of a friend, married a year: she has yet to sully the work bowl with so much as a shallot, because the newlyweds rely on that other shower perennial, the microwave, for all their romantic dinners a deux. I weep for that flame set of Le Creuset, and the gleaming gaggle of All-Clad that will likewise remain virgin long past the Paper Anniversary.

But, oh those heady early days! Sauce Maltaise in rivers. Mayonnaise every night, whether we needed it or not! Pate without cranking the clunky grinder that n'er cleaved to the counter. My weekly batches of quenelles, mousses, terrines and Anchoiade Nicoise rivalled the output of the garde-manger on the QEII, and we ate enough Potage Crecy to handle our lifetime requirement of beta-carotene.

I worked at Crate and Barrel when Gordon Segal owned only four stores and flipped burgers for us employees at the company picnic. The cookware store jillionaire was mad for the Cuisinart; I julienned cases of carrots to the amazement of the nascent foodie class -- and for the personal enrichment of my boss. I used my employee discount to buy my own slice/dice/knead/puree miracle machine (Cuiz One), and replaced it for the first time only two years ago, 6,240 batches of pizza and seven cars later. Not because the machine didn't work -- hell, the motor still purred to life with a flick of the fingertip -- but it had become a wearisome chore to order the now- obsolete mixing bowl. We decided to blow some money for Cuiz Two. In non-culinary terms this is like replacing an '88 Honda never driven outside Southern California.

I lugged Cuiz Two (a Deluxe 11) upstairs to the bathroom and set its squat booty on the bathroom scales. It weighs in at twelve and a half pounds before breakfast -- a food processor middleweight -- some of the Big Boys push twenty pounds. But that twelve and a half pounds is enough to prevent the machine from going walkabouts when it's kneading a pound and a half of bread dough, and its motor has never stalled or overheated. I knocked out a blender in the first twenty seconds of Round One without so much as a standing eight count; it stayed on the mat in acrid electrical meltdown while trying to shred tough artichoke leaves on their way to the compost heap. Cuiz Two doesn't break a sweat.

The food processor's knockout punch is the s-curved stainless steel blade. Pureed chicken livers for all those terrines in about fifteen seconds, pate brisee in thirty, and bread dough in a minute and a half. It's the attachment that gets the most use unless you are, as I was, briefly, in the underground carrot cake business. That said, some of the happiest hours of my working life were spent wowing the world by demonstrating how to grate a zucchini in three seconds with the grating disk, or how to deconstruct a cabbage with the scary-sharp slicer.

I don't pull out the plastic dough blade very often and I don't own the newfangled attachments like egg whips or fruit juicers; I don't need them. The basic kit has never failed me, although I've pulled stupid stuff. Hint: Do not puree large quantities of liquids, crepe batter for instance. To yield two cups prepare five, since three cups will ooze like thin sweet library paste over sixty square feet of countertop and floor when you remove the bowl from the shaft. But the blade will function perfectly, and it will be the work of thirty-five seconds. The cleanup will take a month -- two, if you have grouted surfaces. Trust me.

Should you desire advanced guidance in feed-tube plunger pressing, or need specs for competitive food processors, I refer you to How Stuff Works.

The Magazine

After setting up Cuiz One for its virgin voyage, I shook the box and out fell a slim spiral-bound cookbook: <i>Recipes for the Cuisinart Food Processor</i> (James Beard and Carl Jerome), along with an invitation to join the Cuisinart Cooking Club. I felt as if I had been invited to join a cozy crowd of early adopters before the term had been adopted. Signing up would get me a subscription to the club newsletter, and a magazine called The Pleasures of Cooking. Assuming that my memory hasn’t been wasted by age and Maker's Mark, I remember that the first couple of issues were free, Little Girl. The heady contents of my first issue hooked me, and I would have considered a life of petty crime in order to feed my The Pleasures of Cooking jones -- if the magazine were available today, I'd turn to drugs, numbers and prostitution.

Someone once told me that his collection of The Pleasures of Cooking was the only paper he bothered to rescue from his burning house. The edges of the survivors are black, brittle and redolent of smoke, but he still uses them. Should my house be set ablaze by an untended vat of duck fat, why would I rescue what my daughter calls "that really greasy sticky stack" of cooking magazines before I grab the family silver but after her hand-made Mother's Day cards?

For one thing, they're damn near irreplaceable. Sontheimer published two cookbook anthologies: The Pleasures of Cooking Fruits and Vegetables (Maria Kourebanas, Editor, Carl Sontheimer, Editor Ecco, 1998) and Classic Cakes and Other Great Cuisinart Desserts (Carl G. Sontheimer, Cecily Brownstone, Contributor Hearst, 1994.) They're both out of print, and fine as they must be, they're mere single-subject compendiums. The Pleasures of Cooking was exciting precisely because the subjects were so eclectic. Here's the bill of fare from March/April 1987.

"A Wealth of Welsh Fare" (Fay Carpenter). Gee, I can't remember the last time I saw a long article, with recipes, about Welsh food; in fact, it's the one and only. A slice of Teison Nionod, anyone? (Hang on a minute here -- Bhutanese Cuisine?).</li>

"Plenty of Polenta" (Mindy Heiferling) Think back, Dear Reader: In 1987 polenta didn't nestle in a cryovac tube next to the bacon at the Piggly Wiggly. The few Americans who knew what it was called it as they saw it: high-falutin' cornmeal mush. </li></ul>

May/June 1982 gives us Roy Andries de Groot on "The Mussels of Brussels," and Florence Lin on "Baked and Steamed Chinese Buns". Cuiz One churned out hundreds of steamed Lotus Leaf Buns. Lin teaches us how to turn them into Bat Buns; I remember that I dipped the tip of a chopstick into red food coloring, then dabbed the bun twice. "Mommy! Bat Eyes!” In the September/October 1982 issue, Jacques Pepin butchers, ties and trims all sorts and sizes of game from quail to venison, then Cecily Brownstone offers us a piece of Applesauce Cake for dessert. Julie Sahni teaches a seminar about Indian flatbreads a la Cuiz; the grease stains on the page remind me that in 1982 I made Phulka and Aloo Poori. Left to myself, I would never allow a sweet potato through my front door. Not only that, but in 1982 I distrusted turmeric, had never touched a tandoor or tasted so much as a forkful of vindaloo. Completely ignorant of Indian food, I still felt seduced, impelled, inspired to puree those orange tubers with cinnamon, flatten the paste into discs, and deep fry them in three quarts of bubbling canola oil. It took a month to degrease the ceiling.

The Pleasures of Cooking masthead included James Beard (from its inception until his death), Cecily Brownstone (Sontheimer's Number Two), Paula Wolfert and Jacques Pepin (for the entire run of the magazine). The photography was way ahead of its time, both seductive and instructive. No ads, of course, because the entire magazine was an ad, though forty per cent of the recipes don't require a Cuisinart. There's foodie arcana -- James Beard tells us that he breakfasted from a tray delivered to his bedroom every morning until he turned twelve. In rereading the sticky stack, I marvel at the space Sontheimer gave to Asian food, the charm of Susan Purdy's interview with Jeanette Pepin (May/June 1986. Hmm. Green Bean Salad with Cream Sauce,) and the poignancy of Jacques Mendes's piece about the late Bernard Loiseau in which Christian Millaut describes him as a "fundamentally happy man." (March/April 1986.) Even the reader recipes on the back page are consistently solid: Next time I'm in Oakville, Ontario I'll look up Barbara Gibson, and present her with my Key Lime variation of her Lemon Icebox Cookies, which rock on in the top ten of my Cookie Hit Parade.

Sontheimer inaugurated a long hot series on Indian regional food by Copeland Marks that makes me want to go Goan tonight. Brownstone's series on Classic American Cakes nudges me into the kitchen, where I at last bake the Williamsburg Orange Cake I never found time for back when Jane Fonda and I worked out to Jimmy Buffett together. Here's Copeland Marks again, this time from Tunisia; I'll try that carrot salad with capers, mint, olives and hard-boiled eggs. In fact, I'll make it tonight!

"I'll make it tonight!" Those four words explain why I'm still clutching those twenty-five issues to my bosom when the Coast Guard throws me a line. Of course, I try new recipes every time I pull a cooking magazine from the mailbox. Yeah, I find good, even great, new dishes in print and on line. Sure, Carl Sontheimer wanted us to fall hard for his machine -- and to buy one for Mom come Christmas. He knew that your girlfriend would head to Crate and Barrel and get one for herself when she saw you make child's play of zucchini bread. But the man's love of good food (frat house meals at MIT were a severe disappointment after a French boyhood!) and his pleasure in its cooking continue to inspire, one issue at a time. Within a four-day period this month, he inspired me to make Suzanne Jones's Beaten Biscuits, the Williamsburg Wine Cake, Basque Lamb Stew, Pickled Pears, and Oatcakes.

Browsing Pleasures of Cooking for even five minutes can still, after all these years, turn me on, lift me from my chair and into propel me into the kitchen. I’m, excited, aroused -- lusting! -- to cook something new, something old, something exotic. Something wacky.

Marshmallows

I last toasted a marshmallow on the shores of Lake Massawippi, singing "Louie Louie" around a campfire with my fellow prepubescent Episcopalians. Commercial marshmallows are cheap and dependable, and my annual consumption is exactly one bag, to be melted into the obligatory No-Fail Chocolate Fudge at Christmastime. As my daughter now prefers costlier Christmas confectionery, I may have bought my last squishy sack.

But Carl Sontheimer inspired me to make marshmallows.

The March/April 1984 issue of Pleasures of Cooking included an article by Susan Smith titled "Many Many Marshmallows." I came upon it last month. Lingered over a full-page photograph (a wall of pink and white, chocolate-dipped, coconut-coated marshmallows.) I smiled the way the yearbook portrait of the guy I dated in tenth grade still makes me smile. (Sam was silly, sweet and sideburned.) "Many Marshmallows?" In 1984, I guffawed: Carl had finally lost it, meandered that meter too far on his road to show me the seductive features of Cuiz One. (I do remember making the Devilled Crab from "Jim Beard's Tray Dinners" on page 16.)

This time I read the recipe. Hell, all the ingredients are pantry staples, and cheap ones at that. Boil corn syrup, water and sugar until it reaches 250 degrees. Dissolve some gelatin and keep it warm. Whip three egg whites with an electric mixer, dribble the hot sugar syrup, gelatin and vanilla over them and beat continuously, until the sticky stuff becomes cool and thick. Spread the whole mess into a pan dusted with powdered sugar and cornstarch, wait two hours, cut into squares, and it's magic time, folks. Marshmallows!

Knowing well my struggles with confectionery in general, and hot sugar syrup in particular, I parted with four bucks at Target for a candy thermometer. The drive back seemed longer than usual, the red lights more frequent, the motorists deeply respectful of the speed limit. I did have the decency to mock myself: I was courting a speeding ticket hurrying home to make marshmallows!

Three hours later, I dusted the cornstarch from my fingers. I beamed. Stacked on my best pedestal cake plate were tiers of chocolate-dipped, coconut-coated, pink and white marshmallows. Frothy fripperies, silly and sweet, made, come to think of it, with no help whatsoever from a food processor.

I'd been inspired to cook something new, just for the fun of it, because a whimsical photograph, good writing and a seductive recipe reached from the page, wiggled a flirtatious finger, and pointed me straight me to the kitchen. That's the real reason I'll never part with Carl's sticky stack. Every issue reminds me of how I began to cook, shows me why I still love to cook and pulls me from my chair to cook some more. The title once seemed stuffy, stilted, even smarmy, but Carl Sontheimer christened it right.

Sontheimer didn’t care if you flunked Pompoms 101. His magazine isn’t about restaurant reviews, collectible can openers or finding the best brand of baked beans. He was proud of his late-life Baby, the machine that revolutionized our kitchens, and he wanted us to coo over it, chuck its chin and contribute to its college fund. But above all, he wanted us to believe in the endless delights beckoning us to cook -- the classic, the cutting edge, and the exotic. The pleasures of cooking.

Two Chinese men are walking out of Katz’s Delicatessen. One says to the other, "The problem with Jewish food is that two weeks later you’re hungry again."

Here's another one:

If, according to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5764, and, according to the Chinese calendar, the year is 5724, what did the Jews eat for forty years?

That Jews have an affinity for Chinese food is no secret. The Jews know it. The Chinese know it. Everyone knows it. Until the dispersal of middle-class Jews to the New York suburbs was complete in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese take-out shops opened on every corner of the city. It was said that you could tell how Jewish a neighborhood was by the number of Chinese restaurants.

Going out "to eat Chinese" continues to be a Sunday ritual for many Jewish families; even kosher families know that there are many kosher Chinese restaurants. In Brooklyn, there’s one called Shang Chai, a play on the Hebrew word for "life," chai. Any Sunday at 6 p.m., step into Shun Lee West on West 64th Street, the Upper West Side’s upscale Chinese restaurant, and you’d think they were holding a bar mitzvah reception.

Here's another joke, although it's no joke:

What do Jews do on Christmas? They eat Chinese and go to the movies.

Eat Chinese because those were the only restaurants open on Christmas. Go to the movies because all the Christians were home, and you could get into the theater without waiting on line.

That the Chinese are not Christian is important to understanding the appeal of the Chinese restaurant to Jews. If you went to an Italian restaurant, which, aside from the coffee shop, the luncheonette, or the deli, was likely the only kind of restaurant in your neighborhood before the American food revolution, you might encounter a crucifix hanging over the cash register, or at least a picture of the Madonna or a saint. That was pretty intimidating to even a nonobservant Jew. The Chinese restaurant might have had a Buddha somewhere in sight, but Buddha was merely a rotund, smiling statue -- he looked like your fat Uncle Jack. He wasn't intimidating at all.

Important, too, was that the Chinese were even lower on the social scale than the Jews. Jews didn't have to feel competitive with the Chinese, as they might with Italians. Indeed, they could feel superior. As Philip Roth points out in Portnoy's Complaint, to a Chinese waiter, a Jew was just another white guy.

Italians didn't go out to eat as much as Jews. Italian-Americans spent Sunday afternoons gathering in large family groups, eating Italian food at home. The Italians and Jews continued to live together when they left their immigrant ghettos on the Lower East Side and started moving to the boroughs, along with the Chinese who wanted to leave the impoverished conditions of the Lower East Side as much as any other group. The Chinese that lived among the Jews and Italians in the boroughs were the owners of the restaurants and the hand laundries.

So the Jews' proximity to Chinese restaurants was important, and let's not discount the fact that Chinese food tastes good and costs little. When I asked my parents why, when they were courting in the 1940s, their dates always ended with a Chinese meal, and why we continued to eat in Chinese restaurants as a family more often than at other kinds of restaurants, the answer was simple and obvious. They could afford it. In their youth, during and right after World War II, a classic combination plate of egg roll, fried rice, and usually chow mein cost 25 cents.

The attraction of the forbidden aspects of Chinese food should not be underestimated, either. Eating forbidden foods validates your Americanness: it is an indication that you have "arrived." Although both Italian and Chinese cuisines feature many foods that are proscribed by the Jewish dietary laws, such as pork, shrimp, clams, and lobster, there are two big differences. The Chinese don't combine dairy and meat in the same dish, as Italians do -- in fact, the Chinese don't eat dairy products at all. And the Chinese cut their food into small pieces before it is cooked, disguising the nonkosher foods. This last aspect seems silly, but it is a serious point. My late cousin Daniel, who kept kosher, along with many other otherwise observant people I have known, happily ate roast pork fried rice and egg foo yung. "What I can’t see won’t hurt me," was Danny’s attitude.

Even Jews who maintained kosher homes often cheated by serving Chinese takeout on paper plates. I had one neighbor who would only let her family eat Chinese on paper plates in the basement, lest the neighbors across the alley that divided the houses only by about ten feet should look into her kitchen window and see those telltale white containers on the table.

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Chinese Roast Meat on Garlic Bread with Duck Sauce

This is an exquisite example of Jewish crossover food, "fusion food" these days. It was a dish that made first- and second-generation Jews of the 1950s, Jews who no longer abided by the kosher laws, feel like they were truly Americans as well as urbane and sophisticated. Imagine what a scandal it was to observant parents and grandparents, what a delicious act of defiant assimilation it was, to eat Chinese roast pork on Italian garlic bread.

This was invented in the Catskills and brought back to Brooklyn where, today, substituting roasted veal for the trayf meat, the sandwich survives in kosher delicatessens in Brooklyn and Queens. (It is particularly well done at Adelman's, a delicatessen on King's Highway and Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.) With pork, it is also a hot item in diners on the South Shore of Long Island, where Jews from Brooklyn and Queens moved decades ago.

By all accounts, the sandwich was created sometime in the mid-1950s at Herbie's in Loch Sheldrake, New York. It was the most popular Jewish-style deli-restaurant in the area. According to Freddie Roman, the Borscht Belt comic who years later starred in the nostalgia show Catskills on Broadway, Herbie's was where all the entertainers would gather after their last shows at the hotel nightclubs. "Specifically for that sandwich," says Freddie. "And everyone else had to eat what the celebrities ate."

Herbie's sandwich of Chinese Roast Pork on Italian Garlic Bread was so popular among the summer crowd in "The Mountains," that it was imitated back in "The City." I remember when it was introduced at Martin's and Senior's, two fabulously successful, middle-class family restaurants on Nostrand Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

In just a few years, it seemed Chinese roast pork on garlic bread became so popular in the southern tier of Brooklyn communities -- from Canarsie through Mill Basin to Bay Ridge -- that every diner and coffee shop made it. The sandwich even made it to Manhattan in the 1960s, at a place called The Flick, an ice cream parlor and casual restaurant near the then-new movie houses on Third Avenue.

Eventually, Herbie's, which closed in Loch Sheldrake only several years ago, opened Herbie's International on Avenue N in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, where many of its Borscht Belt customers lived. It, too, was a well-priced family restaurant, serving, as its name was meant to imply, a little of this and a little of that from all over. But, as would be expected in this neck of the woods, "international" was really limited to red-sauced southern Italian, Cantonese-American Chinese, and a few specialties of the Yiddish kitchen. Maybe they served French crêpes, too.

Herbie's original sandwich was undoubtedly made with something other than real butter. Who knows what grease Herbie used. And the garlic flavor may have come from garlic powder, not fresh garlic. There are garlic spreads available in some supermarkets that probably come pretty close to the original flavor. If making the sandwich with pork, you might as well use butter and chopped fresh garlic. Of course, to make it a kosher meat sandwich (using veal), the fat would have to be vegetable-oil based, like olive oil. If you are making a kosher sandwich with veal, using olive oil and chopped garlic not only makes it kosher but also more contemporary. In that case, leave off the Chinese duck sauce, too, and douse the meat with balsamic vinegar. There should be a certain "white bread" quality to the roll with either version. The duck sauce used to flavor the meat is an apricot-based, sweet condiment; Saucy Susan is a popular brand.

Serves 4

4 tablespoons softened butter or extra virgin olive oil

8 cloves garlic, finely minced

4 (6- to 7-inch) French-style loaves, not too crusty nor too firm

1 pound Chinese-style red-roasted pork, or plain roast veal

Duck sauce or balsamic vinegar, for drizzling

Chinese mustard (optional)

To prepare the bread, in a small bowl, make garlic butter by working the butter and minced garlic together with a fork until well combined. For an oil dressing, combine the olive oil and garlic. Let the spread stand at room temperature for 30 minutes or up to a few hours.

Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Heat the bread directly on the middle rack of the oven for about 3 minutes, until hot. Leave the oven on. Remove the loaves from the oven; for each loaf, hold it with a potholder and halve it the long way with a serrated knife.

Spread the cut sides of each loaf with garlic butter or drizzle with the garlic oil. Place the loaf halves, spread-side up, on the middle oven rack and toast until the edges are browned.

To assemble the sandwiches, arrange a layer of sliced roast meat on the bottom half of each loaf. Drizzle the meat with about 2 tablespoons of duck sauce, and then very lightly with Chinese mustard.

Serve open with the top half of the bread, spread-side up, alongside the meat-filled bottom.

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Chinese-American Chow Mein

There was absolutely nothing trayf about basic chow mein. The base was all vegetables. It could even be served in a dairy restaurant, and it was. Sure it could be topped with roast pork or shrimp, but it was just as Chinese topped with chicken or beef, or nothing. Chow mein became mainstream New York food in the 1930s. It was on the menus of kosher and nonkosher restaurants, and hardly a specialty of just Chinese restaurants. Even the chichi Stork Club had a whole list of different chow mein choices. At the other end of the spectrum entirely, Nathan’s, the hot dog emporium on Coney Island, featured chow mein on a hamburger bun garnished with crisp fried noodles. It still does.

About 2 cups white meat chicken, cooked any way and cut into strips (or red-roasted Chinese pork or veal, or sliced steak or roast beef)

Fried Chinese noodles, available at any supermarket

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat the oil until very hot but not smoking. Add the onions and celery and stir-fry for 4 to 5 minutes, until the onions are slightly wilted.

Add the garlic and mushrooms and stir-fry just 1 minute. Add 1 cup of the chicken broth, cover the pot, and simmer for 3 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are tender.

Meanwhile, in a small cup, with a fork, blend together the remaining 1/4 cup chicken broth and the sherry, soy sauce, and cornstarch.

Uncover the pot and stir in the bean sprouts and water chestnuts. Give the cornstarch mixture a final stir to make sure the starch is dissolved. Add it to the pot and stir it until the liquid in the pot is thickened. Taste for seasoning. You may want to add more salt or soy sauce.

Serve immediately, topped with the chicken, on a bed of fried Chinese noodles. It is best when eaten immediately, but you can reheat it, gently, if need be, adding a bit more liquid as necessary.

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Arthur Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based food critic, writer, and media personality. New York Times Magazine has called him "a walking Google of food and restaurant knowledge." His five previously published cookbooks include the IACP award-winning and James Beard award-nominated Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food. Read his 2004 eG Forums Q&A here.

“I’m embarrassed,” she admits as she dips her fingertips in the salt cellar, her voice barely perceptible over the breathy drone of the stainless exhaust fan, her brow shiny with a film of perspiration. She pinches the seasoning at eye level above a half-sheetpan on which six chicken thighs have been arrayed. She inclines her head. “Like this?”

“Yep,” I confirm, hovering close to the pan responsible for the condition of her forehead, checking the viscosity of the oil it contains. Typical kitchen newb that she is, she scatters the salt with a little more care than necessary, then reaches for more. I tilt the pan (it’s warped).

When she finishes seasoning the skin side, she moves to flip the thighs, and I caution her. “Wet-hand -- dry-hand, remember?” She nods and resumes, tucking her right arm behind her.

“Embarrassed about . . . ?”

“I don’t have one of these,” she explains, turning toward me and holding her hands apart, fingers splayed, to indicate the cooktop: five high-output gas burners, two of them blazing beneath iron grates as thick as my thumb and ensconced in an expanse of brushed steel.

“Is your fat ready?” I ask. She peers over the rim of the pan; I fear that the tiny drop of sweat depending from the tip of her nose will fall, splatter and send her running from class.

+ + +

I teach at a local cookware store. For the most part these are two-hour avocational affairs -- how to throw a cocktail party, main–dish salads, that sort of thing. But the most popular course I direct is anything but frivolous: a three-day marathon for “beginning” cooks. The students range from complete novices whose expertise ends at mixing the cheese powder into the microwaved macaroni; to widowers and recent graduates with a sudden need to feed themselves; to experienced cooks looking to fill holes in their repertoire. But these students are hardly empty vessels even when they report for class. A majority of them carry a burden of fear: fear of heat, of sharp pointy objects, of making something that tastes awful. They’re also jam–packed with myth and misinformation.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story (versions abound on the internet) of the woman who grew up knowing that to prepare a pot roast for cooking, you trimmed an inch from one end. It’s what her mother had taught her; her mother had learned it from her mother. After a few years of propagating this custom, the woman grew weary of the chore, not to mention the waste. So she confronted her mother, who referred her to her mother.

“Because otherwise it wouldn’t fit in the pan,” the lady disclosed, solving a three–generation mystery while simultaneously delighting fans of Occam’s Razor.

If you cook or eat, you will trip over misinformation and misrepresentation in every direction. These are rarely the result of malice; rather they evolve as folk “wisdom,” errant utterances that are repeated often enough to become indistinguishable from the truth, or specious customs of dim origin that are nevertheless too stubborn to dislodge.

That’s why people cook in cast–iron pans encrusted with Grandma’s crud; how people end up spending more than they need to for equipment and appliances; and what might explain greasy fried chicken, a broken sauce, lumpy gravy, overdone chicken, underdone pot roast, exploding potatoes and gray asparagus.

People even continue to believe things we know for sure that just ain’t so. A myth, like grandma’s crud, is scraped off only with great effort. Cooks who should know better just from their own experience still swear that searing a steak seals in the juices, though it was disproved many years ago. The list goes on: dried beans must be soaked; bread must be kneaded; pork must be cooked to sawdust; great sushi has never been frozen. None of these things are accurate, but it’s a piece of cake to find true believers in these and many other falsehoods.

And so we encounter our shameful student, who fears she won’t be taken seriously -- who won’t even take herself seriously -- as a cook because she lacks a fire-breathing dragon in her kitchen. It’s ungracious to blame her; cooking shows run almost exclusively on gas (the ranges, and often the chefs), foodie forum denizens casually denigrate electricity (unless it powers an induction burner) as a Hobson’s choice, the way Henry Ford offered colors for the Model T. Those beleaguered with a coil- or smoothtop range pine for deliverance.

It’s too bad, really. When it comes to professional-style ranges in home kitchens, the case for gas is mostly hot air.

+ + +

“Skin side down?” She has the tongs, and the chicken they clasp, in a death grip, her fingers stiff with apprehension, her elbow raised. Nevertheless, she flips the thigh back and forth, her head tilting in counterbalance, the corners of her mouth frozen,

I nod. “That’s right. Start at 12 o’clock -- I’ll tell you why later.” She commits food to pan. Soon, six chicken thighs are chattering away. The sauté pan is immense -- at least a foot across. “Chef,” (students always call me “Chef” until I ask them to stop because it makes me giggle) “Do you always use pans this big?”

“Only when I have to feed two dozen people,” I answer, gesturing at the other groups of students, assistants and store staff. She nods. Her interest is genuine; that she’s committed three days to a beginner’s class is proof. But her question also reflects the common neophyte wish to fast-track competence with emulation.

Imitating professionals is the honorable pastime of enthusiastic amateurs. A-Rod-autographed baseball mitts, Les Paul electric guitars, and spoilers on the family sedan all testify to the power of the halo principle: if Rafa Nadal plays with a Babolat AeroPro Drive GT, getting one will surely improve my forehand. Practicality limits application, though. Few people replace the windows on their Ford Fusions with reinforced netting and install removable steering wheels; Marshall stacks are the province not of basement-bound Stevie Ray wannabes, but of working musicians.

When it comes to furnishing our kitchens, we aren’t so bound by sensibility. The odd and often overlooked fact is that in many ways, the home kitchen of an advanced amateur cook features better equipment than the typical professional shop -- fully-clad pots and pans instead of bare aluminum; utensils with comfortable handles rather than knife-like edginess; digital scales that don’t remind one of either a medieval barber or a jack-in-the-box; ventilation that doesn’t require shouting to be heard. Yet we still want -- many of us, like my student, would say need -- a professional-level cooktop in all its flaming glory. To quote the eminent philosopher Hannibal Lecter, “We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?” We want what we see on TV. We want what we can glimpse through the service door porthole or across the pass of an open kitchen.

What Clarice discovers is that what we want isn’t always what’s good for us, and that ascertaining the reasons why we want a particular thing can comprise a harrowing journey, rife with mistaken assumptions and baffling diversions. If you covet a restaurant-style range, it’s helpful to understand why they’re designed the way they are, because the design decisions that manufacturers make can be irrelevant -- and sometimes at direct odds -- to what a home cook wants or needs.

+ + +

She’s browned the chicken and removed it to a plate. During the sear, we accumulated rendered fat, and using a kitchen towel on the pan’s helper handle, she poured most of it off. Onions, sliced in an earlier lesson, went in to soften and color a bit. She’s absorbed a lesson on reductions through successive additions of sherry and sherry vinegar.

“Now the stock, tomatoes, sugar and mustard. A few grinds of pepper.” It takes but a few minutes to bring the mixture to a boil.

She’s biting her lip as she stirs. “Isn’t gas more, um, responsive?” she asks. “I mean, you turn the dial and the flame pops up. Turn it off, it’s off.”

“Yes,” I agree from across the counter. “But let’s try something. Kill your heat and push the pan off the burner.” She obeys, and the braise calms. “Now pull it back toward you.” Within seconds, the stock returns to a lively simmer. “The burner is off,” I say. “But you can’t fight physics.”

A controlled flame is responsive. So is a good cook, who reacts intuitively to the presence or absence of that blue flame with corresponding notions of “on” and “off.” But a stove burner is part of a system, and there’s the rub. The problem is not the fuel or the burner, it’s the grate that reposes above it. It’s five and a half pounds of cast iron -- weighing more than a 10-inch Lodge skillet. Cast iron is a great material for cooking, if you’re prepared to take advantage of its particularities: low conductivity and high specific heat per volume. The former means that it takes a long time to heat up (and cool down); the latter means that once you do get it hot, it holds that energy for a long time (and it will hold a lot of it). You can flick the flame out, but the grate above it will ooze residual heat for many minutes -- which makes one wonder why a range manufacturer would choose a responsive heat source, then saddle it with such a pokey playmate. It’s because (setting aside the fact that as a system, a gas range isn't very responsive) responsiveness and precision in a heating source is of little value to a restaurant line cook. When restaurants have to be precise, they turn to sous vide, where the simplicity of controlling a electrical heat source rules.

Go to the website of any commercial range company: Garland, Vulcan, Southbend, Wolf, U.S. Range (note that none of these companies make ranges for the home, any more than Five Star or DCS manufacture true professional products; among major producers, Viking alone maintains both domestic and commercial lines). Read the blurb that introduces their range or cooktop products. If verbiage relating to toughness isn’t within the first 25 words (almost always before you find BTU ratings), I’ll eat a gas regulator valve. Despite recent steps towards energy efficiency (Garland touts its second Energy Star Partner awards), the picture is easy to parse: what restaurateurs prize above everything is durability. Home cooks care about it, too, but their cooktops aren’t subject to a couple of dozen pan-slammings every night, nor to the predations of heedless dishwashers. A commercial grate must be sturdy; it’s constantly abused but cannot fail -- a replacement costs hundreds of dollars and can take weeks to procure.

While a restaurateur wants a stove that’s built to last, on the other side of the kitchen pass, a good line cook desires consistency. Without it, a restaurant is by definition a failure. Cooking is a nettlesome panoply of variables; removing even one from the equation that starts with raw materials and ends at the table is manna from heaven. So when a pan is on the burner, the burner is always full-on, converting a variable to a constant. That’s why those massive grates, so hardy and dutiful, please the cook as much as the owner. They mitigate the very thing that home cooks adore about gas: responsiveness. If you want to stop pumping heat into the food, take it off the stove.

These substantial bastions provide two additional benefits. The first addresses another shortcoming of burner design. Proponents of gas cooktops praise its flexibility; one can adjust the flame size to the diameter of the pan in use. This is true, and it’s helpful for heating things quickly. What lies unacknowledged is the inherent flaw in the shape of the flame that the burner creates. When you crank up the fire, a bit more heat will be delivered to the pan where the flame touches it. That’s going to be the outer edge of the flame, because the burner itself sits below the flame. Much of the time, the difference isn’t an issue. Radiance, convection and conductive materials team up to even things out well enough. But at low heat settings, there’s an unavoidable mismatch between flame and pan diameters: the ring o’ fire dilemma. Burner design (like BlueStar’s eponymous profile) and heavy grates, thermal sponges that they are, mitigate scorching of a pan’s contents – but they can’t eliminate it because they still emit energy. It takes a cook’s careful attention to do that.

The second benefit -- and it confers more to the commercial kitchen than the home cook -- is that grate topography forgives warpage. In partnership with the flame’s natural flexibility, the open center and limited number of contact points let the cook claim a few more weeks’ use out of a nine-inch Wearever with a bottom rendered as round as J Lo’s by thermal shock and employee abuse. (Electric burners demand flat or even slightly convex surfaces, which level out as they heat up, for efficient contact.) The domestic chef’s solution to warped cookware -- not that for home-pampered All-Clad, Sitram or Demeyere it’s a common occurrence -- is replacement and a humble promise to be more careful.

+ + +

She tears a paper towel from a handy roll and pats her cheeks and forehead, She lifts her pony tail and fans the back of her neck. “Aren’t gas cooktops more powerful? All those BTUs and stuff?”

According to the US Department of Energy, only about 35 to 40 percent of the heat generated by a gas range actually reaches the pan. A domesticated commercial-style range will have at least one, and sometimes four, 15- to 18,000 BTU burners on a 30-inch model (a commercial range burner will be at least double that). With 60% of those energy units being employed in doing things other than heating your food, the practical rating of a unit like that is really six or seven thousand BTU. The rest goes out through the vent hood, and heats up the room -- and anything in it; hence the sheen of sweat on my student’s forehead. There’s not much to be done about this. You can’t enclose the burner because it needs oxygen to operate, and a system to feed air (in a safe way) to a confined fixture would be a prohibitive expense. The one thing you can do is capture some of that heat and store it . . . in a colossal chunk of dense metal. (The downside of this is that every BTU used to heat a grate is one that isn’t heating your pan or your food in a direct way.)

But even after the efficiency hit, isn’t gas more potent? Let’s compare.

A typical electric burner is 70 percent efficient (we’re excluding induction ranges, which approach 90 percent efficiency). Electric burners aren’t rated in BTUs; they’re rated in watts. This is confusing, because the proper comparison is BTUs to watt-hours: one of the former equals 0.293 of the latter, give or take. So those 6000 usable gas BTUs are worth 1758 watt-hours, again, give or take. A typical high-performance electric cooktop will have at least one burner that consumes between 2500 and 2700 watts (though some boast up to 3000 -- this one, for example). At 70% efficiency, we’re looking at, hey, 1750 watt-hours, a negligible difference.

+ + +

“I don’t get it. Gas is responsive, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not more efficient than electric. Whatevs. Why do restaurants use gas in the first place?”

“How ‘bout you get the sauce from the sauté into the Dutch oven? Then add the chicken without getting sauce on that skin you did such a good job of browning. Then we'll top it and move to the next step.” (We have a logistical issue: that giant pan we used to sear the chicken and construct the braising liquid won’t fit in the oven. On the other hand, flipping chicken thighs in a Le Creuset or Staub pot is awkward tong-wise, and distracts from the lesson.) “While you do that, I’ll tell you a story.”

+ + +

It might happen before dawn, or maybe just before lunch: a guy (it’s almost always a guy), quite possibly hung over, surely sleep-deprived, shuffles through the back door. He carries a bindle of cutlery that he totes from job to job like the kitchen hobo his résumé proves he is. He flips on the lights. Lumens, vicious as rabid sugar gliders in the hot Aussie sunset, ricochet from multiple steel and glass surfaces, incising his bloodshot eyes. He blinks in pain.

But he recovers, and before withdrawing to the locker room to don his checks, he lights the stoves. The ovens are set to 350°F; the front of the flattops are on medium and the rears are on high. Once they reach temperature (it takes quite a while for a steel griddle to suck in all the heat it can hold), they will stay there for many hours, until the last lowly commis to exit the kitchen extinguishes the flames (assuming he remembers). In the United States, this happens about a quarter-million times a day, at least six days a week.

And that’s why restaurants use gas: if you’re going to blast three or four stoves’ worth of professional-level BTUs for eighteen hours at a stretch, you want the cheapest power source you can find. In the US, that’s natural gas. Should you require an exception that proves the rule, note that when Alain Ducasse opened his eponymous restaurant in New York City’s Essex House -- a cost-be-damned enterprise if ever there was one -- he chose . . . electric ranges.

In the home, the difference in the cost of running an electric range compared to a gas range is dwarfed by the voracious maws of water and home heating, air conditioning and keeping food cold. Cooking consumes less than five percent of the average household energy budget. (If you’re really concerned about how much carbon it takes to satisfy your appetite, consider vegetarianism. The little bit of power used to cook meat is but a fly on the pile of energy expended in raising and transporting it -- irksome, but not the root cause of the problem.)

+ + +

“So what are you saying? I should just get over having a crappy electric stove?” She’s crossed her arms; the silicone spatula in her hand sticks up like a flag.

“Hmm. Chefs used to call their ranges pianos. If you play piano, you’d probably rather noodle a Steinway grand than an upright Yamaha, and a Yamaha more than a two-octave plastic Casio sampler. Good tools are a pleasure, but they’re just that -- tools. You’re the cook, and even a four-hundred dollar Kenmore is miles ahead of what Jacques Pepin apprenticed on: a wood-burning behemoth it was his job to stoke.”

“Crappy is as crappy does?”

“We need to get this in the oven. You know,” I wind up for another pontification. “It’s a poor craftsman that blames -- ”

“Chef,” she says, hefting the pot toward me and smiling at last. “Dave, I mean. Put a lid on it.”

* * *

Chicken with Sherry Vinegar Sauce

6 to 8 large chicken thighs (or 4 large thigh–leg quarters)

kosher salt

3-4 tablespoons chicken or pork/bacon fat, or olive oil

1 small onion

2/3 cup dry sherry

1/3 cup sherry vinegar

1 to 2 cups chicken stock

1 14-oz. can diced tomatoes, drained

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon brown sugar

fresh–ground pepper

Preheat the oven to 300˚F.

Slice the onion and set aside.

Sprinkle the chicken pieces with salt. Melt the fat or oil in a large skillet (or oven–proof braising pan if you have it) over medium heat. You want a thin, even coat of oil over the bottom of the pan. When the oil is hot, add the chicken pieces, skin–side down, and fry to a light golden–brown on both sides and remove from the pan. Work in batches if necessary; don't crowd the pan.

Pour off all but a light coating of the fat. Sauté the onions or shallots until slightly browned, about 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the sherry and stir to dissolve the browned fond from the bottom of the pan. Simmer for a few minutes to reduce by about half. Then add the sherry vinegar and cook for several minutes to reduce again by about half.

Add 1 cup of chicken stock, a pinch of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, the tomatoes, sugar and mustard and stir to combine. Bring to a simmer.

If your pan is oven-safe, add the chicken pieces skin side up. If not, transfer the liquid to a large oven–proof pan (with lid) and add the chicken. Add more chicken stock, if necessary, to bring the level of liquid about half to two-thirds up the sides of the chicken pieces -- do not submerge the tops of the thighs.

Cover the pan and bake for 25 minutes.

Remove the pan from the oven and turn the oven up to 400˚F.

Take the chicken out of the sauce and set aside for a few minutes. Strain the sauce into a large grease separator and allow the sauce to clarify. Reserve the solids.

Pour the defatted sauce back into the pan and add the chicken and the solids. Return the pan—uncovered—to the oven for another 25 minutes. The liquid will reduce and the chicken skin will get brown and crisp.

Take the chicken out of the oven. If you want to reduce the sauce further, remove the chicken, put it on a rack and stick it back in the oven (with the oven off). Put the pan on the stove over medium–high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce as desired.

Season with salt and pepper to taste.

* * *

Dave Scantland (aka Dave the Cook) is an Atlanta-based writer, graphic designer and cooking teacher. He is also a director of operations for the Society for Culinary Arts & Letters.

Buried at the back of my freezer, I have just one pint of my father's chicken soup left. Aside from his prayer shawl (which I have requested for my son) and his grandmother’s Shabbat candlesticks (which he gave me when I married), the chicken soup is the only physical thing I have from him. It’s only a pint -- hardly enough to share three ways.

My father passed away last summer, and the certainty of his absence has been slow to take hold. By now I should know that he’s physically gone from my life, but I've reached for the phone to call him most mornings, as part of my regular routine -- to check in on his health or to relay a story about my son, his beloved first and only grandchild. Every few days, I catch myself lecturing internally "You really should call your father -- life should never be so busy that you don’t have time to pick up the phone and check in on him." Then I remember the reason so many days have passed without a call. That’s when I feel the loss in the pit of my stomach.

I always felt especially connected to my father on Jewish issues -- cultural and religious. Raised orthodox by Russian/Polish immigrant parents, my father grew up during the Great Depression. The era and the poverty, along with the customs and the culture, were woven into the fabric of his being. He spoke Yiddish fluently and, with us, his language was peppered with Yiddishisms.

We called my father "Shtetl Man." It was tongue-in-cheek at first but really, it was the best way to describe him. All our family friends came to refer to him as Shtetl Man too. At the Passover Seder, along with the four questions, there were Shtetl Man trivia questions framed in the Jeopardy format -- always preceded by the Jeopardy theme music.

My father could have been Tevye, from Fiddler on the Roof, though he was cast as Lazar Wolfe in the synagogue's production of the play. The cantor, of course, was cast as Tevye. With a little extra padding around the middle, he looked just like the Tevye portrayed by Zero Mostel -- right down to the gap between his two front teeth -- and in real life, he behaved like him too.

Long before political correctness entered the vernacular, my father warned when we were very young that he’d disown us if we married out of the faith. More than once, like Tevye, I imagined him rending his clothing over the loss of one of his three children, should it ever come to that. I knew he meant it.

Sometime before he died and after one of his hospital stays, my father took me aside and with tears welling up (a rarity for Shtetl Man) he drew me a map of the cemetery where his family members were buried. He counted out the gravestones. This row, four stones in, is where his mother and father are buried, two rows over is "the old uncle" and in the cemetery next door are his sister and brother in law, my favorite aunt and uncle, from his side of the family. He wasn’t concerned for himself; he wanted me to know where the family was buried so I could follow tradition and visit them before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

"You're different from your brothers," he told me, "you understand." He meant no disrespect to my older brothers, but we understood that of the three of us, I am the most deeply tied to Judaism -- more culturally than religiously. I can't separate "the Jewish" out from who I am. I keep my father’s hand-drawn cemetery map with my other personal documents, keys to the safe deposit box and overdue Israel bonds.

Until 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been uncommon to see Shtetl Man chopping wood in the back yard. He would swing the axe above his head -- with a log attached -- and heave the whole thing down Paul Bunyan style onto a large chopping block, splitting the smaller log into fragments. Of course my parents had central heating, but he was stock-piling firewood for winter, to cut down on heating costs.

Then he'd walk inside to check on his shischl of chicken soup. Cooking that soup was an all-day affair. He would make the soup and, the next day, my mother would make the matzoh balls.

I asked, on more than one occasion, for a chicken-soup-making lesson, for Shtetl Man was known far and wide for his amazing chicken soup. When both of us were younger, he would have already shopped for the ingredients. More recently, he would wait for me and we'd go to the store together. Then we'd stand in front of the stove together and he’d pull spices from the cabinet nearby.

"First you fill a big pot -- a shischl -- with water and you add the chicken. I like to use legs, thighs, and wings because they add more flavor to the soup and they’re cheaper (always a concern for Shtetl Man). Then I add a tziboleh (little onion,) two if they’re small, I cut up some carrots into chunks—don’t make the pieces too small or they’ll disintegrate, add some celery, parsnips because your mother loves parsnips, and then we add the spices."

This is where things get imprecise. Much in the same way my father never owned a new car in his 78 years of life, he never followed a recipe. He didn’t think in those terms. While my mother loved to collect cookbooks and pore over them, my father never cracked the spine on a single one. He cooked "to taste."

"So, you take the salt and you add about this much to the pot," he’d say, cupping the palm of his bear-like paw.

"How much do you think that is?" I’d ask.

"I don't know," he’d reply. "Cup your hand and pour; you can always add more later if it needs it."

"Wait, wait!" I’d say. "Let me measure it before you pour it into the pot."

He’d give me a look and launch into one of his favorite speeches, one I’d heard him give to many an unsuspecting friend or relative who’d asked for a lesson in chicken soup making.

"It's all about taste," he’d go on. "If you can't taste what it needs, you can't cook a good soup."

We'd go through each of the seasonings like this: parsley, pepper, tarragon and, at the end, a little sugar.

A pinch of sugar was the magic ingredient in many of my father's recipes, from chicken soup to tomato sauce. It was never a lot -- maybe a tablespoon for a large stockpot, but he believed it made all the difference. Having been the beneficiary of Shtetl Man's cooking throughout my life, I had no cause to argue with him.

When we were kids, much the way other children fight over the toy at the bottom of the cereal box (we did that too,) we fought over the pupick in the pot of chicken soup. We would run to the pot muscling and maneuvering to get the pupick for our bowl, and I, the youngest, was right in there with my brothers fighting for the right to the pupick. So my father added extra pupicks to the pot. "It adds flavor," he’d say. When we got older and learned what the pupick was, the fights over the chicken’s "belly button" ceased.

I never did work out a perfect recipe for my father's chicken soup, but whenever I spoke to him on the phone and he heard a hint of a cold in my voice, he'd put a pot on to boil as soon as we hung up. And if he wasn't up to cooking that week, he'd tell me there was some "Jewish penicillin" waiting for me in the freezer, I just had to come to town to get it (I live about 75 miles away).

After my father died, my husband, son and I all came down with colds. We needed soup. Steven and I exchanged nods. It was time: I dug deep into the freezer, and I pulled out a quart-sized container. Lost in thoughts of my father, I heated up one of his last tangible gifts to me: his chicken soup.

I parsed it out so that each of us would have a portion, making sure that our son, just 14-months-old at the time, wouldn’t waste a drop. I narrated to him while I helped him eat -- I told him he was eating his grandfather's chicken soup. The soup was delicious -- but "the finish," as they say with wine, was bitter sweet.

Not long after, I started taking my son with me to a neighborhood synagogue when I went to say kaddish for my father. At first I was very anxious that PJ, who was then walking and talking in his own language, would be disruptive and I'd find us barred from entry. On the contrary, because of his presence I found that we were now celebrities at the evening services. His climbing up and down from the bench, mentions of Dada or Momo (our dog) and crunching on Nature O's never failed to bring chuckles from those standing nearby. And, while I say the words of the mourner’s kaddish out loud, I sometimes think of my father with me, a little girl, sitting by his side as he observed yartzeit and said kaddish for his mother, father, sister or brother.

Every time one of us gets a tickle in the back of the throat, my thoughts turn to that last pint of soup in the freezer. On countless occasions, I've been tempted to heat it up so that I could smell my father's soup cooking on the stove one more time, and feel the steam rising off the broth to my face -- the blanket of love that went into every pot. But I haven't been able to do it because when we eat that last pint of chicken soup it will all be gone forever, and right now, that's something I'm just not sure I can swallow.

<div align="center">* * *</div>

A long-time Daily Gullet contributor and eGullet Society staff emeritus, Ellen Shapiro is a photographer and writer. She lives in New York City with her husband, their son and their bulldog.

Nowadays, molecular-gastronomy is all the rage with adventurous foodies. Sometimes referred to as high-tech cuisine, this modern school of cooking utilizes the latest scientific innovations and molecular biology to transform traditional approaches to cooking. New dishes are created through avant-garde preparations, equipment, and plating. Some are whimsical, some are startling, and some are simply new and pleasantly surprising to the palate.

As June rolls around – and I learn that Tony has decided to hold off opening his doors until he gets his liquor license, which could take a while – I decide to make a reservation for my birthday at a new place opening up in Chicago that I’m extremely curious about.

Graham Elliot Bowles is a young super-star chef on the rise in national food circles. A big, beefy, tattooed hipster, this thirty year old prodigy has an impressive resume for such a young man, having kicked around Chicago for several years with some of the biggest names in the local restaurant scene. He was the Executive Chef at Avenues in the Peninsula Hotel, a four star restaurant. He’s worked with Charlie Trotter for years, and also as the Chef de Cuisine at Tru, another four-star Chicago restaurant. A nominee for numerous James Beard awards, he’s been featured in all the magazines and has appeared on the Food Network’s “Iron Chef” and as a competitor on the wildly popular Bravo TV series “Top Chef Masters.” He is a judge on Fox TV’s “Master Chef” with Gordon Ramsay.

When I learn that Bowles is opening his own restaurant in Chicago, I have to check it out. The place will be called, fittingly, Graham Elliot, and is being billed as Chicago’s first “bistronomic” restaurant. I guess what this means is simple American bistro fare elevated by scientific razzle-dazzle, as well as a sense of fun. Some people call it “food as art,” but I never liked that phrase. I never wanted to eat a painting. But when I read about the menu at Graham Elliot’s on line, I get really excited.

So one afternoon I go down to the near-north side to the gallery district, where the place is located, to see if I can get a reservation. I’m wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a baseball cap, and when I get there I recognize the man himself inside the window. The place is beautifully designed, with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling windows, and hundred-year-old brick walls, but I can’t tell if they’re open or not… so I knock on the door. And Graham himself comes up and opens the door.

He’s a big guy with cropped hair and very hip glasses. He reminds me of many of the offensive linemen I had battled against in my football days. But he is very friendly and unassuming. He tells me that they’re opening up that night, and he would be happy to make a reservation for me. We chat as he’s taking down my information. “You know, I’m actually a cook,” I blurt out at one point in the conversation, thinking, what the hell?

“Yeah?” he says, punching my name into the reservation file. “That’s cool.”

I tell him about the Hofbrau, Mon Oncle, and my current status waiting to start at Tony’s.

Without a pause he says, “Yeah, that’d be great. Sure. We could use the help. When do you want to come in?”

By now it’s probably becoming apparent that one of the overriding themes of this book is this: If you have in-depth food knowledge, and some skills, and the passion, and the cojones, it’s not that hard talking your way into professional restaurant kitchens. Even the best of the best. The work is there. You just have to be open to the possibilities.

Here’s another example: It turns out a buddy of mine in my apartment building frequents the same health club as another top Chicago chef: Martial Noguier.

Paris born, movie-star handsome, and a graduate of the French Culinary Academy, Martial Noguier has, for nearly a decade now, been one of the most underrated chefs in Chicago. Bar none. The executive chef at a place called one sixtyblue, he has gotten rave after rave from food critics and guidebooks alike over the years. Ironically, the day after I meet Graham Elliot, my buddy calls me up and says one sixtyblue has lost some people lately, and he mentioned me to Martial. Martial wants me to call.

He wants me to call him?

Located on Chicago’s west side, in the trendy market district, one sixtyblue is part owned by basketball legend Michael Jordan. Inside, it’s plush, and sleek and low lighting – a place I have always admired – so when I hear my neighbor has the ear of the Star chef Martial Noguier, I’m thinking, hmmmmmmm . . .

I get on the phone, and I get the chef on the line. “Hi, Chef Martial, this is Wayne Cohen, a friend of John’s.”

“Can you work Thursday?” the deeply accented voice interrupts.

I practically flinch. This is just too easy. It should be more difficult than this. “Well, actually, I’m sorry to say I can’t on Thursday.”

“And why not?”

“Well, to be honest with you, I’m working at Graham Elliot’s on Thursday.”

“You’re working with Graham?” He accents the word Graham with that wonderful, intense, musical, French lilt: Grrrrrrrrrrrayham?

“Yeah,” I say, “I am.”

“Then come in Friday.”

“Well…”

“You must! You must come in Friday!”

So I agree.

How could I not agree with a great chef who speaks like this?

<div align="center">* * *</div>

Wayne Cohen, aka Wayne Cohen, was born in Chicago, and has been a lover of food most of his life. He started cooking at thirteen.

His passion for cooking continued to grow; fueled by his obsession for great food, from Hong Kong street vendors, to a truffle menu in the south of France. From great restaurants to burger shacks, with a pile of cookbooks, food magazines, and newspaper recipes, he pursues the best food.

That veal stock today should be so phenomenally underrepresented in all media directed at the home cook during what's considered to be a "food revolution" in America is ironic.

I should here counterbalance what might seem on the surface a sort of veal stock fanaticism of mine. Most cuisines of the world do not rely on veal stock at all. The whole body of vegetarian cuisine, for example, gets along perfectly without veal stock. Asian meat-based stocks rely largely on chicken and pork. Italian cuisine uses it occasionally but on the whole seems relatively indifferent to it. One of America's most innovative chefs, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a classically trained Frenchman, became well known in chef circles for eschewing veal-stock-based sauces at his restaurant Vong. Judy Rodgers, the Francophile and French-trained chef at the very American, very eccentric Zuni Cafe in San Francisco, includes no veal stock recipe in her Zuni Cafe Cookbook, which hews so strictly to the recipes used at the restaurant, her cooks refer to it continually in their daily work. She says she simply hasn't found a good source for veal near her restaurant and so doesn’t use veal stock.

But, of course, Vongerichten and Rodgers can work wonders with plain water. It’s the non-pro who stands to gain the most from veal stock, the home cook. Taking this one item, veal stock, and adding it to your kitchen is like taking the four-cylinder engine of your Mitsubishi and turbo charging it; with the addition of a turbo, the engine becomes not only faster but more fuel efficient. Veal stock, same thing -- it not only makes your food taste better by miles, it makes you more efficient in your efforts at creating delicious food.

Here's how simple using veal stock is. Dice mushrooms, about a cup's worth, and mince a shallot. Have ready a quarter cup of tasty white wine and a cup of veal stock. Get a sauté pan smoking hot over high heat. Add a coating of oil, which should ripple when it hits the pan and begin to smoke. Toss in your mushrooms, let them cook for a few seconds, then stir -- the more browning you get the better the flavor -- and cook for a minute or so. Add the shallot and cook, add the white wine and continue cooking till it’s almost cooked off, then add the veal stock and bring it to a simmer. Add some salt and pepper, stir or swirl in a couple tablespoons of butter, and you have sauce for four portions of a meaty mild fish, such as halibut or cod, or slices of beef tenderloin. This same sauce would be perfect for sautéed veal (add a squeeze of lemon) or pork medallions (add a tablespoon of mustard). If you’ve salted and cooked your meat properly, the dish will taste better than the fancypants dishes at your favorite French restaurant --rich and mushroomy and meaty, with great body and, from the butter, smooth texture and lusciousness -- because it is fresh and made à la minute, and because it came from your kitchen. Deglaze the pan you've roasted a chicken in with veal stock and you will soon have an amazing sauce just as it is, or easily enhanced by adding, say, basil, tomato, and olives, or tarragon and chives.

You can do this with chicken stock -- you can do this with water, for that matter -- but it’s not the same.

There's nothing like veal stock. It's a marvel.

None of this is news to a restaurant chef, and any restaurant chef worth his salt could abandon veal stock and make do because they’re chefs and have a great range of tools and techniques at their disposal.

But the home cook, limited by time and money and cooking knowledge, ratchets up his or her talent by a factor of ten by making veal stock. Honest to God, it's like magic, like getting your wings.

“She can’t even boil an egg!” Before she stopped being able to boil water, that was the last word on kitchen cluelessness. Between you and me, that cook with the bad rep got a bad rap. It’s easier to poach an egg, fry an egg, whip up an omelet, or serve forth a souffle than it is to soft-boil an egg. It’s easier to shuck oysters, pass the CPA on your first sitting, or train cats to pair socks than it is to produce a perfect soft boiled egg.

A perfect soft-boiled egg has a completely cooked white and an oozing warm yolk. A few seconds too few, and you’ll tap open a nauseating translucent-white/cool-yolk combo that goes straight into to the dog’s dish. A few seconds too many, and the yolk’s soft but stiff—a medium-cooked egg. (I’ve never understood the medium-cooked egg; it seems like a soft-boiled or hard-boiled gone wrong. But with lots of butter and regrets, it’s edible.)

Last winter I craved a soft-boiled egg. I wanted to wash my dusty collection of bird-bodied eggcups, some unused since I scored them at a long-ago tag sale or my first visit to a Sur la Table in Santa Monica. I wanted pain de mie, toasted, buttered and cut into soldiers. I got greedy: why not two soft-boiled eggs, scooped warm from their shells onto a nest of toast points? I’d lost my job, the Black Dog of depression was my faithful mutt, and the grey days of February were broken only by oral surgery and the bloody orgies of Tess Gerritsen thrillers. Even the best-adjusted lady—and I’m medium-adjusted at best—would get wiggy. In my darkest hours I considered going into the egg cozy business. What better way to keep my fingers occupied (and my smoke count under forty a day) than to create egg couture? What better way to while away a few months of meds, Monster.com and unemployment checks? I realized I was reverting to craftswoman consolations, and that I’d better slap on some eye makeup, pull out an egg carton and check out any new thinking about how to soft boil an egg.

My father was the family egg cook, and I remembered his recipe for a Four-Minute Egg: lower an egg into a pot of water at a gentle boil, set the timer for four minutes. Remove when the timer dinged. Daddy made a reliable soft-boiled egg.

Research beguiles me, so I whiled away a few hours with cookbooks. According to the experts, from the Rombauers to Harold McGee, Daddy had it all wrong. What I’ll call the “Slow Start” is accepted wisdom in egg cookery. Put a 70-degree egg into a saucepan, cover with an extra inch of cold water, bring to a boil, then simmer for two to three minutes.

North Americans don’t leave eggs on display in cunning wire baskets, nor do I know how to find an egg’s armpit and take its temperature. Sure, I could have warmed one in hot tap water for a couple of minutes, but that seemed like fussiness; we’re talking about a boiled egg here, not zabaglione. My plan was to cook the egg for the longer suggested time and if necessary, try, try again. I’d paid $1.79 a dozen at Walgreen’s for my test subjects and I could afford to be fearless; I wasn’t experimenting with sturgeon eggs.

I filled a small deep saucepan with water and slipped in the egg. The problem with the Slow Start Method is that it requires devoted pot-watching, because the timing starts when the water reaches a boil. The cook has to see when the rolling bubbles form. I’m sure there’s a remote thermometer out there that would beep as the water reached 212, but that seemed like mucho materiel for a fifteen-cent test subject.

I lurked, the water boiled. I turned it down so that it maintained a tranquil bubble, and set the timer to three minutes. I busied myself buttering toast then stood, tea strainer in hand, to pull out the egg when my squat red kitchen timer chimed.

A boiled egg is hot, wet and slippery. With the help of a potholder I wrangled it into an egg cup and stood there counting back the years—the last time I’d boiled an egg, Oasis and Blur were thumping from my daughter’s bedroom. I performed a gentle tap tap tap with my paring knife and reached for the toast fingers.

Raw egg white. Slimy, snotty, raw egg white and a thin liquid yolk that was barely warm. I tossed the egg, tossed the toast—almost tossed my cookies—then refilled the saucepan with water and deposited Test Subject 2. I didn’t spend a lot of time waiting for the water to boil because the phone rang. By the time I’d convinced a landscaping company that I was planning to let my property revert to prairie, the water was preparing to churn out big-boy bubbles. I adjusted the heat, set the timer for three minutes, and made more toast. When the timer pinged I started counting. When I reached twenty (one thousand) I pulled the egg, beheaded it and danced a victory Watusi: the white was cooked firm, its texture neither rubbery nor shiny and glutinous. The yolk was runny, lightly thickened and clung to the toast like White-Out on a black satin jacket. I topped up the butter and salt and pepper in the perfect Brancusi serving vessel and thought: “I stressed less the last time I made Beef Wellington!”

Washing up, I pondered. Slow start, rolling boil, and three minutes and twenty seconds to soft boiled bliss—too much pot watching and counting for fifteen cents worth of perfect protein. I don’t have a timer that ticks off to the second. Waiting around for the pot to boil was dandy; I could wipe off a couple of cabinet doors or start a batch of yoghurt. But the counting method was primitive. I cast about to find a better metric for that three-minute twenty-second paradigm.

I reeled with my brilliance—I was a freaking genius. I have the perfect set-up in my kitchen, a CD player with a remote. All I’d need was to find a 3:20 track, cue it up and hit Play. No need to buy a more sensitive timer, no dorky counting. All the February misery and meds were as nothing. I was on my way back, Baby!

I tore into the glittery stacks of CDs, only to face another challenge. My beloved Motown/Stax selections rarely hit two minutes, let alone three. After spending four hours I’ll never reclaim, I found two possibilities for my digital egg timer: The Who: “My Generation” (3:18) and The Bagpipes and Drums of Scotland: “When the Battle is Over"(3:21).

My husband couldn’t see the coffee table for the CDs when he got home. Neither would he buy into my brilliance—he gave me the same wary glance that I’d last seen when I told him that our path to a whiz of an old age was going to be strewn with designer tea cozies. He thought I was nuts.

He was right. I’d entered culinary Cuckoo Land.

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I just wanted a soft-boiled egg I could eat without the bagpipe overture. The Slow Start Method wasn’t making it, so I decided to forget the Rombauers and McGee and try my father’s Fast Start Method. I wouldn’t have to mooch around the kitchen, catching the water as it hit 212. I could stick a pan on the stove, walk to the mailbox, answer the phone or run out for cat food and cigarettes, tasks short enough to assure me a pot of boiling water.

Father didn’t know best, or he’d used smaller eggs. A four-minute egg done Fast Start was the exemplar of what I can’t gag down. I was negotiating sutures and bleeding gums, unable to chew a steak or gum Rice Krispies, I was empty and angry. I was hungry. Why couldn’t I boil an egg?

I make my own marshmallows. I can knock off puff pastry without the maidenly dew of sweat. I can bone animals and fish big and small. My Paris-Brest, my babas au rhum, my bacon and eggs get good press. Not only can I make a perfect pate, I can source caul fat in the 'burbs. But I couldn’t boil an egg.

I was as committed to my goal as Newton was to The Calculus. As to mathematics and time, I discovered that my microwave—a machine I've owned for ten years—had a timer that counted to the second. (That’s what happens when you store your microwave at knee level.) As severe as Marie Curie in her lab coat, I in my apron set out to make lab notes.

February15: 4:20. Threw it out. White nowhere close to done. Oatmeal for lunch.

February 17: 4:35 Tossed it. 15 extra seconds didn’t make much of a difference. Yoghurt and a banana.

February 18: 4:50. Almost! White still too soft, but I ate it! (Pick up some pepper later.)

February 20: 5:00 White cooked. Yolk thick and runny! Perfect!

I’d conquered the soft-boiled space/time continuum. I’d come up with a nice round number—five is an elegant array of minutes. I could pull an egg straight from the chilly Styrofoam carton. I could eat an egg for lunch until the sutures melted. I could look forward to ancient decrepitude sans teeth, sans everything, knowing that I’d still be able to gum a soft boiled egg.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story called “The Birthmark,” in which the husband becomes so disturbed by a tiny stain on his gorgeous wife’s cheek that the birthmark blinds him to her beauty. When I had topped my excellent egg, the albumen was still a micro-millimeter unset where it met the yolk. My obsession egged me forward: I knew in my bones I hadn’t achieved perfection—I was roosting on mere excellence. That slippery remnant of white became a preoccupation, the niggling doubt that I’d failed to capture the egg-cup grail.

How to firm up the ends without risking a medium-boiled egg? I wasn’t going to mess with my five minutes learned the hard way, no Siree Bob! I considered finding the wire holder that comes with the Easter egg dye kit, and parboiling each end for fifteen seconds before lowering the entire egg into the pot, but that would feel like cheating because it would require extra counting. (Nor did I want my husband to suggest that I should adjust my meds.) But that twist of wire was my Newton’s apple—it sent me free associating about Easter baskets. I prick one end of the eggs I hard boil for Easter, to protect them from cracking. What if I pricked both ends, exposing the white to some extra heat? There was no hard science to back up my hunch, just intuition and desperate, piteous hope. I wanted to crack this ovoid mystery and move on with my life.

I punched two neat holes with the very needle I’d used to appliqué satin braid to my baroque egg cozy. I lowered the egg into boiling water. I set the timer for five minutes. I found a forlorn English muffin at the back of the fridge, and started it to toasting. I fretted. When the magic minutes were up, I stood my egg in its cheery cup, and crossed myself. I topped my prize, and checked the white. God must listen to the prayers of atheists: it was perfect. Not excellent, perfect.

As Simon said: “Time, time time, see what’s become of me, while I looked around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please.” Time flies. Time is of the essence. Had I but world enough and time. There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.

The time for my purpose was five minutes flat.

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Margaret McArthur, aka maggiethecat, is the former editorial director of the Daily Gullet. She writes, cooks and tends her garden near Chicago.

]]>122037Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:12:22 +0000Turn Left and Do the Cakewalk Prancehttps://forums.egullet.org/topic/139933-turn-left-and-do-the-cakewalk-prance/by David Ross

I was pushing my shopping cart through the aisles of Yoke’s Supermarket on a recent “Fresh Friday,” when a spritely-sounding young woman announced over the public address system, “Attention shoppers, attention shoppers, two minutes until the next Cakewalk, two minutes.” Frozen with suspense and the anticipation of winning one of Yoke’s chocolate crème de menthe cakes, I stood pat on the number 36 yellow flower pasted on the floor in front of me. I wasn’t going to budge off that number 36 -- I wanted a cake. While I waited to hear my number called, I was overcome with a sense of nervous anxiety --the same emotion I had felt as a young boy waiting to win a cake when I was seven years old. I wondered why a boyhood fascination with winning a cake still left me with such a deep, lasting hunger some 47 years after I first danced a Cakewalk.

What was it that tugged at my heart, telling me to delve deeper into the meaning of the Cakewalk? Why did I sense that there was an underlying truth I hadn’t discovered as a child? The only way I could unveil the mystique behind my relationship with this odd little dance to win a cake would lie in retracing the footsteps of my childhood, setting forth on a quest to discover the history of the Cakewalk.

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We moved to Salem, Oregon from The Dalles, in the Summer of 1964, when my Father, Edgar Ross, accepted a position at the Oregon Department of Agriculture in the Commodity Commissions Bureau. My parents settled on a ranch-style, three-bedroom home on the corner of Ward Drive and 46th Avenue in the new community of “Jan Ree” Gardens. Our lot was bordered by new homes on two sides and to the East was a field of Blue Lake bush beans that would soon be consumed by the encroaching development. Mother and Father shared a few details about our new home. It had a second bathroom, a wood-paneled living room and an unfinished family room that my father promised would have a metal wood stove. But they kept one little secret from my sister and me until we were a block from our final destination on the day we drove to Salem -- our new house was next door to the grade school. I didn’t know whether to feel good or sick at the thought of living next door to the school where I would spend the next five years.

Hayesville Elementary School was typical of the architecture of grade schools built in the early 1960’s-an L-shaped, non-descript building painted in drab green and grey. The assembly room, cafeteria and administrative offices anchored the building with the classrooms jutting out from the principal’s office. I started the school year in Mrs. Rhonda Sample’s second grade class. She was young, blond and attractive, totally unlike the spinster vision I had of the teacher that awaited me at my new school. The highlight of the school year was the annual “Open House at Hayesville.” Students showcased their talents, dazzling parents with displays of frogs and snakes in aquariums, samples of cursive writing on paper chains hung over the blackboard and paper mache busts of historic American figures like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Mothers and fathers could take a tour of the gleaming, stainless steel kitchen where Mrs. Fox prepared our hot lunches each day-warm, billowing cinnamon rolls dripping with powdered sugar frosting and her buttery, oven-fried chicken. But the most anticipated event of Open House at Hayesville was the annual Cakewalk Raffle -- a silly fun dance around the classroom. The winner won a cake and the proceeds went to fund other activities at school.

We cut footprints out of colored construction paper and pasted them in a large circle on the spotless, pink vinyl-tiled floor. Each “foot” was given a number from one to twenty. Red, white and blue streamers were tacked on the outer walls and then brought to the center of the ceiling to define the center point of the cakewalk circle. When the room was ready, Mrs. Sample turned on the lights and opened the door, welcoming a parade of Mother’s who pranced into the room carrying Tupperware cake caddies, Pyrex baking dishes, glass cake domes and disposable aluminum trays coddling their precious cake creations.

Three long tables were placed against the wall and covered with proper linen tablecloths. The tables served as the stage upon which the cakes would strut their stuff. The chorus line of cakes went on and on through the annals of cakedom-Chiffon, Angel Food, Devils Food, Sponge Cake, Pound Cake, Marble Cakes, Chocolate Torts and Jelly Rolls. There were cakes garnished with coconut, dusted with nonpareils, frosted with peanut butter, sprinkled with peppermints, and dotted with spiced gum drops. I entered the Cakewalk over and over until I won, seemingly always at the end of the evening when very few of the best cakes were left on the table. While Mother’s “Burnt Sugar Cake with 7-Minute Frosting” was good, it would be a total embarrassment in front of ones classmates for a kid to choose the cake made by his mother. No, should I win the Cakewalk and should it still be available, I would choose the Spiced Praline Crunch Cake made by Bernie Bennett’s Mother.

The historical importance of the Cakewalk wasn’t a part of Mrs. Sample’s second-grade curriculum at Hayesville in 1964. Living in the Pacific Northwest, we were insulated from the racial struggles of the South at that time. I was a young white boy in a middle-class American family. I led the colorful life of a kid, yet I lived in a country that saw only shades of black and white.

Only three years before my second grade, in the Spring of 1961 the Freedom Riders set out on a campaign to test the Supreme Court Ruling that upheld the segregation of blacks and whites at bus depots, waiting rooms, lunch counters and restrooms throughout the South. The Freedom Riders were met with ignorance and violence. African-Americans couldn’t drink from the same water fountain I drank from. I never knew.

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The Cakewalk played an important role in the history of America -- a long-forgotten chapter that tells the story of the struggles forced upon the enslaved, who in spite of their burdens rose above the oppression of race and found a new form of the expression of freedom.

The seeds of the Cakewalk were sown in the segregated deep South sometime around 1850, as a parody of the way plantation owners escorted their ladies into a formal ball. The women wore long, ruffled dresses of silk and glass beads with long, white gloves that reached above the elbow. The gentlemen were outfitted with top hats and tail coats. Couples pranced and paraded into lavishly decorated ballrooms, arm-in-arm in high-stepping fashion, marching into the center of the party, often to the music played by a banjo-strumming fiddler who worked in the fields.

The winner of the dance contest sometimes won a cake presented by the master of the house, leading many to think this is where the name the “Cakewalk” comes from.

African-American slaves who watched the proceedings took the dance on as their own in the yards outside their shacks, mocking what they saw as the frivolous customs of the plantation owners. According to the oral histories of slaves and their descendants, the Cakewalk was a marriage of traditional African tribal dances and rhythms combined with the dance steps of the upper classes. When the land barons and ladies saw the slaves dance, they missed the satirical element entirely, but the popularity of the Cakewalk had been established among the elite and it now transcended the boundaries of class.

Wealthy farmers went on to sponsor competitions between plantations and the dance moved to large cities in the South and then to the East where it became a staple of traveling minstrel shows and ultimately to Vaudeville, the lights of Broadway and throughout Europe.

On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation with these humble words, “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Inspired by the renewed freedom gifted to them through Emancipation, a freedom that allowed them to express themselves openly through dance and music, African-Americans led a creative revival that would usher in new forms of dance and music that had never before been seen or heard. The artistic contributions of former slaves and their descendants would forever change the creative landscape in America.

From this humble beginning in the sweltering, humid heat and back-breaking work of picking cotton, African-American artists penned the notes of a new from of music called ragtime that would eventually evolve into jazz. It was the Cakewalk, unintentionally and ironically, that crossed the bounds of race and class status as it burst into the popular consciousness of America By the 1890’s, African-American actors, dancers and musicians had started forming their own production companies and staged versions of the Cakewalk became all the rage.

Scott Joplin, (1867-1917), was an early musical pioneer of the Cakewalk style of music. Known as the “King of Ragtime,” Joplin wrote and performed in the style of rag—a combination of dance and marching music entwined with the “ragged” rhythms and soul of African music. One of Joplin’s most famous pieces was “The Ragtime Dance,” (published in 1902), that included a Cakewalk:

“Turn left and do the “Cakewalk Prance, Turn the other way and do the “Slow drag, Now take your lady to the World’s Fair and do the ragtime dance. Cakewalk soft and sweetly, be sure your steps done neatly.”

The vaudeville team of Mr. Egbert Williams and Mr. George Walker were two of the first African-Americans to take their musical show on the road in a grand scale. Crowds packed into The New York theatre in 1903 for 53 stunning performances of song and Cakewalk dances in William’s and Walker’s new production “In Dahomey” -- the first all-black musical to be performed on a grand scale in a major Broadway venue. After its raging success in America, “In Dahomey” crossed the Atlantic, performing for seven months of standing-room-only audiences at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London before returning to New York.

By the turn of the century, Americans were moving off farms and into towns and cities in record numbers. Ragtime music transformed into a new genre called “Jazz,” with emerging talents like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington playing at the Cotton Club in New York.

By 1930, the public fascination with dance theatre began to fade as America was lured by the intrigue of other forms of entertainment like talking motion pictures. But the early concepts and the heritage established by the Cakewalk endured throughout the twentieth century and into the 21st, namely, as a contest to raise money at church socials and school functions. The Cakewalk also delivered new words into the American vocabulary-“take the cake,” and “it’s a real cakewalk,” are terms used to refer to something that is “the best,” or a job easily done. Cakewalk software is a cutting-edge firm today that produces award-winning digital audio and recording software to the music industry.

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I’m nearing my 54th birthday in November, some 46 years removed from my second-grade class. I had been lost until that Cakewalk at Yoke’s, yet now I’m found. I’ve learned a lesson in respect through the Cakewalk -- a lesson that taught me how emancipation allowed the enslaved to express themselves through music and dance. A lesson that freedom is an unalienable right bestowed upon all Americans. I’ve gained a deep appreciation for the place that this little ditty we call the Cakewalk plays in the history of America, opening our eyes to a world that was color blind.

I found my personal truth in the Cakewalk -- a truth far richer and deeper than the dreams of a boy winning a cake.

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David Ross lives in Spokane, but works a one-hour plane ride away. When he's not tending to his day job -- or commuting -- he writes about food and reviews restaurants. He is on the eGullet Society hosting team.

If you were to pin down the spot on my culinary being’s map from which my every journey extends, it’s the thriving burg of Meat and Potatoes. Yes, my culinary GPS has led me down blue highways and brown dirt roads, across lakes and oceans to oysters, sea urchins, and caponata, but this woman knows her roots.

My mother became an adventurous cook the year Lulu and Maurice Gibbs got married -- none of her kids will forget the first Boeuf Bourgignon -- but before that milestone year she was all about the spaghetti and meatballs, the meatloaf, and the Salisbury Steak. She didn’t like hamburgers, which may be why I can’t now make it through a week without three -- one great, one so-so and one off the 99 cent menu at Burger King, no fries. (I can be a slut for chain hamburgers but I’m as pure as a novice when it comes to fries; only the “holy crap good!” need apply.) Salisbury steak night provided a happy combination of a giant patty sans bun, with enough onion gravy to fill up a sauceboat and mashed potatoes a sure thing. Carrots were a shoo-in too, because she adapted her Swiss Steak technique -- vegetables braised in the sauce -- when she made Salisbury Steak.

I don’t have her recipe, and she now dines in the celestial halls off bijou servings of Peking duck, sole meuniere and savarins, so I can’t spend forty minutes talking food with her on Sunday night, as I did for thirty years. (My sister-in-law Hilary, a caterer, called her chats with my mother “Marilyn’s Recipe 911.”) But I don’t need her recipe, because I made it often enough for family dinners in my teens. Its elegance: six ingredients, if you include the carrots, a bowl, a spatula and a frying pan with a lid -- a twelve year old could, and did, make it.

Mix together a pound and a half of ground round, a half cup of breadcrumbs and a quarter of a package of Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix. Pat it out into a dinner-plate sized patty in the frying pan. Turn on the stove to commence the browning, then slice an onion.

Add a teaspoon of vegetable oil and sauté the onions until almost tender. Peel a few carrots and cut them into fine julienne; my mother had an immutable distaste for circle-cut carrots. Toss in the carrots, the rest of the package of Lipton’s and a cup and a half of water. Here, my mother would add the occasional heel of a bottle of Gamay. The soup mix ,water, wine and pan scrapings made for a gravy good enough to eat from piece of bread in the kitchen when I knew no one was around.

Cover, and cook for the length of the first act of the Callas/Gobbi recording of “Rigoletto,” which measured my parents’ cocktail hour. The only tricky part is flipping that disk without breaking it -- I used two spatulas. Brother Ian was the mashed potato prodigy of the family -- he focused that early testosterone into pounding potatoes and pushing the dairy.

If you tried this today your kids would like it a lot. You’d transcend the depressing bad rap conferred on the dish by college cafeterias and TV dinners -- loser food -- and appreciate it in a hip sixties groove. Enjoy it, while you put Blind Faith on the turntable, pull your hippie aunt’s granny square afghan over your knees, and grab a Fresca. Party like it’s 1969.

My father always pronounced it “Sallusburry,” not because he didn’t know the pronunciation of the great cathedral town, but because he’d met someone who didn’t, and that lady’s take on the name tickled him. I’d assumed that the dish was the product of post-war rationing, English mince and mashed, and the coming of age of cooking from a box, can or envelope.

I was wronger than mini marshmallows in a Waldorf Salad, dumber than a box of Ding Dongs, more misled than Harold Camping’s congregation. I was a continent and a century off, The name is not that of an English bishopric but an American doctor and health reformer who’d have 86ed the carrots and potatoes. It can be so fun to be so wrong.

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It’s not like Dr. James Henry Salisbury (born Scott, New York 1823, died 1905, buried in Cleveland Ohio) started his career undereducated, flakey, or faddy. He earned a Bachelor of Natural Science from Rensselaer, in 1844, and worked for the New York Geological Survey until 1852, retiring as Principal Chemist. Like any common- or garden-variety Victorian overachiever, he’d picked up his MD in his spare time, from Albany Medical College in 1850. He was one of the earliest adopters of Germ Theory, later won the McNaughton Prize for his essay “Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever.” He was the very model of the modern -- well, nineteenth-century -- Science Guy.

But war changes everyone, and triage and trauma on the battlefields of the Civil War did its number on Dr. Salisbury, transforming him from an admired academician to a nutritional nutball. Napoleon might have said that an army travels on its stomach, but both armies on both sides of the conflict found that it also drags its sore ass. Reading about the losses from diarrhea and dysentery, one marvels that either side could command a standing army. Squatting is more like it.

The main killer diseases were those that resulted from living in unsanitary conditions. In 1861 typhoid caused 17 per cent of all military deaths, whereas dysentery and diarrhea caused a sick rate of 64 per cent of all the troops in the first year of the war. The following year this figure reached 99.5 per cent.

Union Army records show that a large number of its soldiers died from diseases caused by contaminated food and water. This included diarrhea (35,127), typhoid(29,336) and dysentery (9,431). Drinking from streams occupied by dead bodies or human waste and eating uncooked meat were the cause of large numbers of deaths. Regular soldiers who had been trained to be more careful about the food and water they consumed, were far less likely to suffer from intestinal disease that volunteer soldiers.” (Link here.)

In 1862, 99.5 percent of the men in blue and grey were doubled over from germs or viruses and dying by the thousands, many helped on their way by the most modern pharmacopeia, a mixture of mercury, chalk and botanicals called “blue powder” or “blue mass.” Here’s a description of its manufacture from an article in The Telegraph:

It was made by grinding and rolling mercury, liquorice root, rose water, honey, sugar and dead rose petals into pills. When American researchers used a 19th century recipe to recreate the drug they found that it would have delivered a daily dose of mercury that exceeded modern safety standards by nearly 9,000 times.

It was also prescribed as an antidepressant, and the Telegraph piece speculates that the outcome of the Civil Was could have been different had Lincoln not gone off his meds. He said blue mass made him “Cross.”

What a grim choice: death by diarrhea, or death by mercury poisoning! Salisbury was appalled, and when the war ended he devised the Salisbury Diet as a lifetime regimen for everyone, not simply soldiers. Dried corn and peas were the real villains of a soldier’s diet, he decided, and decreed that fruit, vegetables and starches should take up no more than a third of one’s daily diet. Carbs were to blame for everything from tumors to tuberculosis. He was a true believer that dentition was destiny and in 1888 he published <i>The Relation of Alimentation and Disease</i>, proposing that our teeth made us carnivores. It’s in that paper that his recipe appears. The good Doctor in his own words:

Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage . . . The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling, or it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired.

Well, he didn’t overpack his ground beef, said “moderately well” not “well,” and promotes generosity with condiments. But Doc, where’s the gravy, the mashed potatoes, the carrots, the onions? Verboten -- after all you might bust out a new bunion if you ate too many vegetables!

(As important as the beef was the beverage on the Salisbury Regime: lashings of coffee or hot water with every meal. And sorry, readers with a curiosity about condiments, I couldn’t find much about Halford Sauce online except for this ad: “ Halford Leicestershire Sauce: The Most Perfect Relish of the Day. An Absolute Remedy for Dyspepsia. Invaluable to all Good Cooks. A Nutritious Combination for Children. Invaluable for Soups, Hashes, Cold Meats, and Entrees.”)

Anyone alert to the fad diets of the twentieth century will have twigged to the fact that Stillman and Atkins owe Salisbury big time. But unlike them, it wasn’t all about weight loss for J.H. He believed that this was the great dietetic cure for all that ailed us. He was called in to treat Brigadier General Ely Parker, the Seneca hero of the Civil War, who was dying by inches from diabetes. Salisbury took on Parker pro bono, but ultimately failed. I love what Parker said about Salisbury: “I am continuing the diet of beef and hot water. I see the Doctor often. He is very kind and good."

But I gotta ask: the propagator of Germ Theory didn’t consider that human and equine corpses, shit and vomit in the water and on the battlefield might have been the reason troops dropped their pants in the shrubs and died by thousands? Why didn’t he see that we have teeth that grind, like those of vegetarian ruminants, as well as the pointy canines of the meat-eating wolves? Why would he have thundered blame if his patty shared a plate with mashed potatoes and carrots? Perhaps his guts turned to water for years as he cared for the dying, and he attributed it to the legume diet he shared with thousands of soldiers. If my daily battlefield choice was to face a plate of pulse or starve, I might blame my bloats on the beans too.

How did Salisbury’s record hold up against the other messianic American food reformers of his era? Eighty-two was an excellent lifespan for anyone in the nineteenth century, especially a man who was theoretically in ketosis for a third of his life. Sylvester Graham, of the eponymous cracker, who preached against meat from his Presbyterian pulpit, died at 57. Horace Greeley, journalist, vegetarian, teetotaler and Presidential candidate died at 61, before the votes from the 1872 elections were even counted. (He lost in a landslide, poor guy.) C.W. Post shot himself in his sixty-eighth year. Only John Harvey Kellogg, the Baron of Battle Creek, outlived Salisbury -- he ate his final bowl of cornflakes and hung up his spoon when he was 91.

If you’d ordered Salisbury Steak at a lunch counter before 1916 your waitress would have responded “Say what?” It took another tragic war to put Salisbury’s name on the menu and into the freezer case, eleven years after his death. Just as my maternal great-grandfather, descendant of Pennsylvania Dutch Tories, changed his name from Maus to Moss during the anti-German sentiment of the First World War, the ancestors of the food nationalists who most recently gave us the Freedom Fry decided to rename a popular entrée. What blue plate special was de-Saxonized and renamed for Salisbury? The humble Hunnish Hamburger Steak. What a shame that neither the men at Manassas nor the soldiers of the Somme ever ate one in uniform.

"Your crab was dry," Mike says as I walk into his shop, Williams Seafood Market and Wines in the Spokane Valley. He tells me the crab cakes I made on TV back in December looked delicious . . . but the giant Dungeness Crab that he donated for the on-camera display "looked dry and the shell wasn’t shiny enough."

Mike’s brutal critique doesn’t shake my resolve to do another seafood dish. I tell him I’m at the store to purchase the shellfish that I need for the dish I’ll be doing on Sunday: "Grilled Shrimp Stuffed with Crab."

But thanks for the constructive criticism, anyway. I guess I should count myself lucky. My small fan base includes a wisecracking fishmonger. Such is the life of a cook on local television.

During the week, the program is called "Good Morning Northwest." The show focuses on news and weather, and serves as the lead-in to "Good Morning America," on ABC.

On Sunday, the show takes a different turn-much like the local programs that first aired on television back in the early days. The laid-back, carefree attitude and spontaneity of live, local television, lives on at "Sunday Morning Northwest."

The first half-hour of the show always includes a reading of the newspaper headlines from the small, rural, farming towns that surround Spokane. If a moose decided to take a dip in the community pool in Omak, you can be sure it will make the headlines of the Okanagan County Chronicle -- and it will certainly by noted live on "Sunday Morning Northwest." The weather is usually done from a live remote at a local community event.

Of course, the Sunday show is never complete without a cooking segment featuring a local Chef or nervous home cook.

We’ve seen everything from "Roasted Loin of Elk with Huckleberry Demi-Glace" presented by the Chef of a fancy resort in Northern Idaho to the Woman who won the Spam cook-off at the Interstate Fair.

It’s all done in the spirit of promoting local Chefs and restaurants while having fun with food and cooking. (And as fate often demonstrates on live TV -- the viewers have a few laughs at wacky cooks who muster-up enough courage to come on live television and make some sort of horrendous tuna casserole).

We try to make the recipe simple enough that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time, but we don’t restrict ourselves to doing recipes in 30 minutes or less.

If you have to chill the custard base of the ice cream overnight, that’s what we tell the viewers. While we may use short-cuts on-camera to demonstrate the steps of the recipe, short cuts in the actual recipe aren’t allowed for the sake of convenience.

If crab cakes taste better when they’re sautéed in clarified butter, so be it. We don’t forsake flavor at the cost of cutting fat and calories. We present the most flavorful dish possible.

I e-mail the producer about three weeks before the show with a general idea of the dish I’m planning. Then about three or four days before the show, I send the recipe of the final dish. This allows KXLY to do promos up to two days in advance of the show: "Coming up on KXLY Sunday Morning Northwest, our favorite local chef, David Ross, will be preparing a delicious dish using fresh Dungeness Crab and Shrimp from Williams Seafood in the Valley."

The recipe we post on the station’s website is usually written to serve 6-8 people. But, when you cook on local television, there is a very, very important consideration that you must factor into your shopping list-enough food to feed the crew.

That means a recipe written for the public to serve precisely one "Shrimp Stuffed with Crab" to each of 8 guests, is a much different, and much larger recipe, behind the scenes. It’s more than just a matter of prepping 8 stuffed shrimp. It’s a matter of stuffing 30, maybe even 40 shrimp.

I triple or quadruple the quantities called for in a recipe so that I can feed the cameramen, the floor director, the producer, the hosts, the sports guy, the weather lady, the DJ’s in the adjacent AM radio station booth-every person working in the studio on Sunday morning will have at least one of these delectable stuffed shrimp. (It’s vital to send the crew home sated; they are the ultimate taste-test panel. If they like your food, the viewers will like it too.)

After the recipe for the dish I put together an "Invoice," a shopping list of ingredients that lists the cost of the products I’ll be buying for the recipe. This serves as my contract, if you will, for KXLY.

The final piece of the written paperwork for each show is the "script" that I write for myself.

This isn’t the same type of "script" that might be rehearsed by the actors on "The Bold and The Beautiful." The only person that reads this script is me. (And maybe the co-host who glances at the script tucked under the plate displayed on the set). When you cook on local television you don’t rehearse with other actors. If you choose to rehearse you do it at home ahead of time.

Remember, this is live TV. We don’t have room for errors. We don’t do re-takes or re-shoot scenes. We’re LIVE! For my own piece of mind, I need a script as a sort of crutch to lean on. (Hey, Martha always has a cheat sheet on the counter).

The script is my guide to all the points of the dish that I want to convey. This Sunday, I want to mention Williams Seafood and the array of products that Mike offers. I’ll talk about using wild American shrimp because they have a sweeter taste than farm-raised, and I’ll demonstrate how the prosciutto serves as a natural wrapper to hold the crab stuffing in the shrimp.

The script helps me with my timing when I’m on-camera -- and timing is critical when you cook on television. I rehearse the script over and over and over in my living room, while a little white kitchen timer ticks away.

I can’t tell you how many professional chefs and amateur cooks I’ve seen on television who didn’t rehearse their bit-and the results on live television were disastrous.

(Like the chef who -- at the moment of presenting his dessert -- realized that he left the ice cream in his car. In the sun. He literally ran out of the studio, on live TV, to go get the ice cream.)

The only small measure of direction I get from the Floor Director on the set is when I’m told to "look into the camera" seconds before the red light comes on.

+ + +

I’ll need two of Mike’s best crabs for Sunday’s show -- one for the meat in the crab stuffing, and another one for the display of ingredients on the set.

This morning Mike takes literally 20 minutes to scrub and wash the shell of the prized "display crab." As he toils away, I vow to honor his crab by insuring that the shell will be kept wet and shiny during its appearance -- or I won’t be able to show my face in Mike’s shop again.

I’ll be making a crab cake mixture to stuff the shrimp. I’m wondering if Mike can top himself after the wondrous crabs he’s already given me, but he doesn’t disappoint today -- his fresh Wild American Shrimp fished out of the Gulf of Florida are just the right size to hold my savory crab cake stuffing.

In the case of Sunday’s dish of Stuffed Shrimp, the recipe calls for grilling the shrimp on the outdoor barbecue. But we won’t be barbecuing the shrimp on camera this Sunday. I’ll grill the shrimp at home and then we’ll go through the motions of the cooking process during our live segment.

I try to have all of my prep work done by late Saturday afternoon so I all I have to do on Sunday morning is pack the coolers and drive to the studio. There won’t be a Hummer limousine at my doorstep on Sunday morning waiting to whisk me in comfort to KXLY. I’ll be driving myself to the studio in a Dodge pickup.

My home office serves as the "staging" area for packing the coolers. Make note of the supplies on the floor next to the cooler-dishes, toothpicks, silverware, tongs, spatulas and kitchen towels.

And yes, I am following the direct instructions of Mike the fish guy -- I bought a spray bottle at the "Dollar Store" so that I can keep our precious "display crab" wet on camera.

+ + +

I’ve never cooked on the "Today Show" on NBC in New York. I’ve heard that cooks who appear on "Today" are escorted into what is called a "Green Room," catered with lush displays of fresh fruit, vegetable and cheese trays, pastries and a never-ending assortment of beverages to await their few moments of fame. We don’t have a "Green Room" at KXLY. What we have is a room used by the weekday news staff to script out the flow of the news programs.

Not having a Green Room is a blessing in disguise. The atmosphere in the studio is very casual and I don’t have to sit in a cold, lonely room waiting for a perky intern to escort me to the studio. I wait in the studio.

You learn to be patient and immodest around the crew -- these are the people who watch you unzip your pants in the studio. You pull out your shirt so they can thread a small microphone from your waist, underneath your shirt, up to your neck and then clip the little mouthpiece to your collar.

The only style advice I ever got was from my co-host, Teresa Lukens, who cautioned me not to wear a striped or checked shirt on-camera-something about the pattern of my shirt being a distraction to the viewers. (And I thought the girth of my waist was more of a distraction to the viewers than the pattern of my shirt).

I don’t wear a Chef’s coat, because I don’t consider myself a Chef. I’m a cook and I want the viewers to relate to my story and my personality with ease and comfort. I want them to feel comfortable going into their kitchens at home and creating the types of dishes they might have at a restaurant. I don’t want to scare them by thinking only a guy in a chef’s coat can cook good food.

Our kitchen at KXLY comprises an electric, flat-top stove inserted into a formica cabinet on wheels, held in place with sandbags. We don’t have an oven, refrigerator, freezer or running water. We make do with what we have-and that’s why I bring my own spatulas, spoons and water bottle to spray the crab.

After the "Pet for Adoption" segment, I’m allowed on the set to get ready. I usually have about 15 minutes to unpack the coolers, put the ingredients on display and get the stove-top heated.

We begin our cooking segment with a 30-second lead-in, usually after the local sports report. Teresa introduces the dish we’ll be doing and then we break to another commercial. I don’t have a lot of time to grill shrimp when we go live on KLXY -- only four minutes total for cooking time and discussion of the dish with my co-host. I’m lucky to have Teresa as my host. She knows food and cooking. She knows that prosciutto is cured Italian ham and she knows it’s thin and slightly salty. She knows to ask if smaller prawns will work for the recipe. And without prompting, she’ll ask why I’m using fresh Dungeness crab instead of canned lump crab meat. At the end of the segment we cut to one last commercial.

As we come back live, Rick and Teresa are their normally gracious selves, tasting the stuffed shrimp and declaring it delicious. The show is a wrap.

One more taste-test lies ahead before we can bring this journey to an end. What will the crew say about my "Shrimp Stuffed with Crab?"

They tell me the stuffed shrimp were delicious. But you know what they really liked? What impressed them the most? The radishes.

About a week after Sunday’s show, I went back to Williams Seafood to get some photos of the shop for this story.

I find Mike behind the counter cutting fresh tuna steaks.

"At least it looked fresh this time," he says.

+ + +

Epilogue

Shortly after I finished this piece, I began working with KXLY on our next cooking segment, which was scheduled to take place on Sunday, November 16.

The plan was to cook some unique side dishes that the home cook could easily do to accompany the holiday turkey or prime rib. At least that was the plan until I picked up the local newspaper on November 2.

When I turned to the business section, I saw the ominous news: "KXLY cancels weekend news program." I immediately contacted the producer.

I had been cancelled -- a victim of the horrible state of the economy. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. Cancelled after seven years and dozens of live cooking segments. Cancelled.

Because "Sunday Morning Northwest" wasn’t the lead-in program to "Good Morning America," on the weekdays, it relied heavily on local advertising for its survival. ABC wouldn’t (and KXLY couldn’t) carry the burden of producing a local show that didn’t feed into network programming.

With so many local businesses filing for bankruptcy and others literally closing the doors, one of the first budget items to go was television advertising -- advertising revenue that paid to produce "Sunday Morning Northwest."

I wasn’t the only on-air "personality" to get the pink slip. The weekend weather "person" also got her walking papers. Rick and Teresa Lukens returned to the security of the KXLY-AM 920 radio booth and continue with their weekday morning drive-time show.

And I have taken an unwanted leave of absence from local television. At least for a few months.

Loyalty is not a word that is highly regarded in the television business. If ABC cancels you, you talk to NBC and so I’ve shifted my ambitions to KHQ -- the local NBC affiliate.

KHQ airs a local morning program seven days a week. So if the culinary Gods are praying for me, someday soon I’ll begin doing a live cooking segment on the "KHQ Morning News."

* * *

David Ross lives in Spokane, but works a one-hour plane ride away. When he's not tending to his day job -- or commuting -- he writes about food, reviews restaurants and -- obviously -- does food presentation. He is on the eGullet Society hosting team for the Culinary Culture and Kitchen forums.]]>122452Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:22:12 +0000Toastedhttps://forums.egullet.org/topic/135470-toasted/<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1286609993/gallery_29805_1195_32275.jpg" hspace="8" align="left" width="285" height="285">by Erin Garnhum

Dear Gully,

I have the sneaking suspicion that everyone around me is having much better breakfasts than I am. It's a meal I just can’t skip, but I always feel hesitant and risk-averse. Since I’m usually pressed for time, I’ve become a coward.

It’s hard to talk about living in a different country without addressing breakfast. I’m originally from Cole Harbour, Canada, (Have you got a map? You’ll need a pretty good one.) Breakfast to me there meant toast and coffee while listening to Information Morning on CBC, before bundling up for the bus. Now, I live in Suzhou, China (Still got that map? It’s near Shanghai.) and my life is, in many ways, (all instigated by me of course, no sympathy necessary) turned upside-down, dig all the way to China, on its head. A fast, familiar breakfast is what I cling to.

Suzhou is a city of several million people; you’ve probably never heard of it. Likely you’ve heard of other locales of four million or more: Toronto, or Los Angeles, or, say New Zealand. They’re bold dots on that map you’ve got, places maybe you’ve been to, places you’ve seen on TV. If I asked you, you’d probably say that people eat maple syrup and beavertails there, or Pinkberry and Gogi tacos, or legs of lamb and expensive pinot noir.

The official population statistics for Suzhou are actually somewhere around six million; in fact, the city boundaries around us never quite fade to fields. East and Suzhou slips into Kunshan, then solidifies and hardens into the wall of brick, glass, steel, and dumpling steam that is Shanghai. North, and West, the streets of people give way to streets of factories, and turn slowly into Wuxi, and then on into the distance filled with names of places that I wouldn’t ask you to pronounce without a good primer to PinYin in your hands (along with that map). They’re doing a census here this year: big red banners are all over our buildings and courtyards asking us to comply with civility with the census takers. I’m sure they’ll count all the people; what I’d really love them to enumerate is all the different things you could have for breakfast.

It would be possible to drive through Cole Harbour and remain entirely ignorant of what the population is eating. In Suzhou? Impossible. In Cole Harbour, you might catch a quick glimpse into a car alongside, the driver sipping a Tim Hortons coffee or balancing an egg sandwich, but your attention will be on driving. In Suzhou people seem more concerned with the eating than the driving on their commute. A drive down the street in Cole Harbour will show you shop after shop of chain restaurants with drive-thrus, but no signs of actual consumption.

Still have that map? Maybe it’s a Google Map? Scroll in on Suzhou until you come to the centre of town, my centre axis, the street where I live, and running a straight line down from it, the street where I work. I live in the Master of the Flower Garden Building complex, a poetic name for what is no more than five or so buildings with the odd rosebush and ornamental pomegranate thrown in. It’s in an alley next to the Song Dynasty “Master of the Nets” Garden. The Garden is a Unesco World Heritage Site; my apartment complex is coasting on their reputation. The street is Shi Quan Jie -- Perfect in Every Way Street. I don’t know if it’s actually perfect in every way, but if you need a hot soup and meat filled baozi for breakfast on your way to work, hand-pulled noodles slipping through spicy peanut sauce, crisp fried sesame and spring onion pancakes, deep fried you tiao donuts. Fruits you’ve never seen before -- if this is what you call breakfast, Perfect Street is perfect for you.

These days, I get none of it. I’ve eaten toast and drunk coffee hunched in pajamas at my computer, with iTunes playing CBC’s As It Happens; it’s my only tether to Cole Harbour for the rest of the day. My work day starts at 7:30 am, and the thought of making it out the house and then acquiring breakfast is a non-starter. I trade delicious for sleep and comfort.

In China, I don’t take the bus. When I open my garden gate in the morning, I heave on to our family e-bike, piloted with nerve and grit by my husband. We whistle down the centre of Suzhou to Number One High School (est. 1035 -- also the Song Dynasty, in case you’re counting Dynasties. Maybe we should have a Chinese history book along with that map and PinYin primer?) We dodge more e-bikes. We careen around grannies in pajamas on push bikes, baskets full of qing cai and green onions. We skid past kids on scooters, texting on their iPhones, Coco bubble teas swinging in plastic bags from the handle bars while they stuff fresh-fried you tiao donuts into their mouths. We brake heroically as homicidal taxis -- battered Volkswagen Santanas, not driven so much as buffeted by drivers drinking tea made with leather-brown leaves in old beanpaste jars -- turn left suddenly in front of us. Black Audis driven by chain-smoking men in suits -- they don’t have time to eat, they are DOING BUSINESS? Those we give lots of space. We slip through holes and cut through clots of chaos, and ogle what everyone else is having for breakfast.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1286609993/gallery_29805_1195_31814.jpg" hspace="8" width="429" height="285" align="right">We fly by the Yang Yang Dumpling House, but the doors are shut. The metal safety door is at half-mast, and the day’s vegetable delivery is being carried in by young men in chef’s whites, their morning cigarettes dangling. No simple boxes here: so many vegetables go in, they’re carried in twenty gallon plastic tubs -- cabbages, cucumbers, Chinese leeks, grosses of white onions. In the kitchen are thirty twenty-somethings fresh off a bus from Shandong or Hubei (check your map); they’ll spend their whole day at the cutting board armed with their cleavers and red-pack cigarettes. But they don’t do breakfast.

As we cross over Renmin Boulevard, I’m cheating now -- the street gets narrower in width and scope; and it’s no longer Perfect in Every Way Street. But my sense of direction is linear, and we haven’t turned left or right, so in my head, we’re still on Perfect Street. The Clots of Chaos are coming faster and stronger now, like meteors burning up -- the brake squeals are more furious, the brushes with other people’s breakfast closer. We’re next to the market. Every morning, I want to tap my husband on the shoulder and ask him to stop, but I can’t; we’re already late, and I’d never get through the throngs. I want to stop and walk into the bamboo steamer towers and get a plastic bag full of baozi -- pork with rich broth; chicken with pine nut and ginger; chive and smoked tofu; sweet black sesame and peanut.

I can see men in stretched white undershirts and neat trousers picking their way carefully through the mixed-density traffic, hefting bags of ten or more of these dumplings, on their way to breakfast tables of people who are lucky to have later starts to their day than I do. I have entertained the fantasy of reaching out and plucking a bag from their hands as we whiz by: Grand Theft Dumpling. But I know the traffic would never allow a clean getaway. They have earned their dumplings and anyway, I have eaten my toast.

Traffic will play out such that at this point in the commute we’ll be forced either left or right, dodging the cars slowly emerging from the sanctity of their apartment complex parking. Lanes are but a suggestion, and the yellow line down the centre has been painted not to divide us into groups of people going This Way or That Way. The yellow line is in fact there for the cars to follow down the centre of the road. The sides are taken up by bicycles and people going in both directions in semi-regular intervals.

<img src="http://forums.egullet.org/uploads/1286609993/gallery_29805_1195_64006.jpg" hspace="8" width="285" height="426" align="left">As we make it through the last intersection and cross onto a street that even official signage admits is no more than an alley, we pass a street corner thronging with people. If we’re forced left, a wooden table is covered with rows of small white baozi lined up like breakfast soldiers waiting for their turn in the steamer. There’s a lady there in an apron, and she’s rolling out lumps of dough, filling them with scoops of pork filling from a red-and-white enamel pan. When each is filled, she twists the top and drops it onto the steamer tray. A long line of students, ID cards around their necks, is waiting for its breakfast. If they haven’t made the run to Coco, they’re here. At the front is a man tending a wok full of oil, set just off the street on the sidewalk, shielded from the rain by a rainbow beach umbrella. He’s dropping in ropes of white dough, and plucking out glistening donuts -- you tiao. No neon “hot” signs are needed; we can all see his are fresh. A hot you tiao would be just the thing with some milk tea, but they slip past us, just like the baozi.

If we’re forced right, I peer in the open fronts of noodle shops. The cooking is done outside; more woks on the sidewalk. Giant pots of steaming water also mark the place as a noodle shop, if you find the old-fashioned calligraphy on his sign a challenge to read, as I do. The laoban has his mise en place set up on his table in small steel bowls; his cooking oil is in an enamel cup that commemorates either a shop opening or a party congress. I can read only the date. Red chili oil, brown peanut sauce, green chopped cilantro: a painter’s palette of garnish. I have occasionally run over, in the perpetual Suzhou rain, for a bag of his noodles for lunch, and I know for a fact they are nothing short of a restorative tangle of carbohydrate. I can see the neighborhood bent over the tables set inside out of the rain. Only the tops and backs of heads are visible, as everyone tries in vain to keep splatters of chili oil off their shirts. I am simply not up to this challenge at breakfast.

Arriving at our school, the neighbourhood duck comes out to honk a morning hello. My husband comes to a seat-sliding halt in front of the Cold Drink Fridge, run by a young family who sit around the fridge door. Since all the water coolers in our school maintain the temperature of the water at a qi-optimizing 25 degrees Celsius, this is our last chance for a Cold Drink to round out our breakfast. Purveyors of the Cold Drink Fridge care not for our qi (um -- Chinese-English dictionary? Any chance of…? No? Actually, I think it means energy. Or life force. Or something). They are happy to make a few kuai off of our blatantly unhealthy lifestyle; at lunch they also sell fried chicken sandwiches.

Bottles in hand, I join my students walking through the gate, and say a “Ni Hao” to the Gate Guard as we walk by. They are stuffing their you tiao into their mouths and manically sucking on their Coco straws, hoping to get the jelly bubbles down before their homeroom teachers bark out orders to jettison cold drinks. I have enough time to get my own tea jar going before the day starts for me, and thoughts of breakfast evaporate like the dumpling steam.

I hope your own breakfasts are not as filled with regrets as mine.

Best,

Erin

<div align="center">* * *</div>

Erin Garnhum (aka nakji) lives and teaches in Suzhou, China. She is an eGullet Society manager.

]]>135470Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:37:57 +0000The Path of the Huckleberryhttps://forums.egullet.org/topic/135805-the-path-of-the-huckleberry/by David Ross The Native Americans and the Huckleberry "Ischit Wiwnu" -- Path, Huckleberry. In the Sahaptin language spoken by Native Americans of the Warm Springs tribe, “Wiwnu” is the word for the Huckleberry -- the elusive berry that symbolizes sustenance, community and the passing of seasons. The ancient path of the huckleberry is covered by the foot-steps of generations of Native Americans. In late summer when the huckleberries came into their peak, the indigenous people left their villages along the Columbia Plateau in North-Central Oregon in search of the “Wiwnu” on Mount Hood. Under a towering canopy of old-growth Douglas fir that cloaks the mountain, they set out on a trail through the forest, snaking a path through thick vegetation of fern, Pacific dogwood and vine maple. The path spiraled upward, hugging the breast of the mountain, a thin layer of mist blanketing the Valley floor below. After they had risen thousands of feet in elevation from the forest below and reached the timberline, the path of “Ischit Wiwnu,” led them to the blessed ground. They called it “Wiwlúwiwlu Taaktaak” -- huckleberry meadows -- lush alpine carpets of native grasses bursting with a stunning palette of orange agoseris, broadleaf lupine and Henry Indian paintbrush bordered by huckleberry bushes holding a bounty of berries. They set camp at “Wiwlúwiwlu Taaktaak,” staying into early October picking huckleberries and filling their baskets for winter. A Basket of Huckleberries for Prineville Native Americans used dried huckleberries to provide nourishment throughout the winter, mixing them with meats into “pemmican” -- a combination of ground meat, fat and dried berries. Venison, elk, and salmon from the mighty Columbia River were common types of proteins used by the Warm Springs in making pemmican. In the 19th Century, the Warm Springs people found a source for selling fresh huckleberries that would provide them with income -- and the path of the huckleberry would lead to my Grandmother’s farmhouse in Prineville. The Slayton ranch sits just to the East of town, carved into a narrow valley bordered by the Ochoco Mountains, the homestead was born out of a land claim staked by my Great-Great Grandfather Samuel Slayton in 1868. My Grandmother, Mildred Lura Slayton, told the story of a Native American woman who went door-to-door every autumn selling fresh huckleberries out of a hand-woven basket. The dark purple beauties had been gathered on “Wiwlúwiwlu Taaktaak” in the huckleberry meadows on Mount Hood. I considered Grandmother to be a very good cook. She was born in 1898 in a farmhouse with no running water and learning how to cook was a necessity. Yet she was a unique woman and cook for the times. Grandmother learned the technical skills of cookery by becoming the first woman in her family to graduate from college, bearing a degree in home economics and teaching from Oregon Agricultural College (today Oregon State University) in 1919. As I got older, I came to appreciate Grandmother’s cookery skills even more. Her degree in home economics taught her the fine science of confectionery -- her fondant, walnut penuche and fudge were specialties. She never made fudge with marshmallow crème and refused to make a batch on a rainy day because she said that too much moisture in the air would cause the sugar to crystallize and the fudge wouldn’t be creamy. Yet it was her huckleberry recipes that I remember the most. She put up huckleberry jam and preserves, but for my taste, her fresh huckleberry pie was the most memorable. Grandmother’s huckleberry pie was perfect -- a buttery, flaky crust rolled into a soft blanket then gently pressed into a glass pie dish. She never used cornstarch to thicken her pie, just enough sugar and a few pats of butter to give the season’s berries respect. The scent of Grandmother’s warm huckleberry pie pulled out of the oven was unmistakable: the aroma of exotic spices and herbs with a hint of juniper—the essence of the mountains. Imagine the thoughts running through the mind of a young boy watching a huckleberry pie as it cools, knowing this is a slice of pie he will eat just once a year. The crust was delicate yet crisp, light as a feather. The warm juices of the huckleberries streamed onto the plate, melting into the big scoop of vanilla ice cream served with the pie. It was heavenly. My Grandfather, Floyd Angus Ross, was an accomplished huckleberry cook in his own right. While we were fast asleep, Grandfather would be up before dawn tending to his field of Russet potatoes, carving out irrigation channels with his shovel. Grandfather returned to the kitchen before we arose and began breakfast, mixing a batch of fresh huckleberry pancakes that he cooked on a well-seasoned griddle on top of the old stove. A huckleberry pancake is a pancake like no other. Grandfather’s huckleberry pancakes were light and fluffy yet still had the texture of a soft “cake,” with the even, tan color of a diner pancake. The heat of the well-seasoned griddle would temper the berries just to the point that the sugars inside would burst, sending an explosion of huckleberry into every bite of pancake—the tart, yet sweet rush of fresh mountain huckleberry juice mixing with sweet-cream butter and maple syrup. A Huckleberry Grows Wild The huckleberry is a member of the Ericaceae family of plants—part of the Vaccinium genus. Other plants in the family include the blueberry and cranberry. There are over ten different species of huckleberry that grow wild in the Pacific Northwest, most on the Eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon, East to the Selkirk Mountains in Northern Idaho and the Bitterroot Mountains in Western Montana. The huckleberry is a fastidious berry, preferring acidic soil commonly found in volcanic regions. It thrives in elevations above 2,500 feet with a long, cold winter and a heavy snowpack, which preserves the buds with a heavy coat of snow. A dry spring increasing to a warm June, building into a hot August then tapering back down to a warm September lazing into October is the most favorable weather conditions for the huckleberry, delivering the perfect balance of sweet, yet tart berries. Wet, cool summers stunt the growth of the berries and blistering heat that lasts over the course of months withers the concentration of sugars in the fruit. One of Mother Nature’s natural barometers of the annual huckleberry crop are bears. Black bears and Grizzlies share a voracious appetite for the huckleberry, feasting in the meadows until they are literally intoxicated with the delirious joy of the huckleberry feast. The huckleberry provides a bear with important vitamins and nutrients as they store calories away before retiring to the deep-sleep of hibernation. Experienced huckleberry pickers outfit themselves with a bell, air horn and bear “spray” before stalking the path of the huckleberry. One does not really compete with a Grizzly Bear for few buckets of berries. Should a bear choose to stake a claim on your huckleberry patch, you best retreat back down the trail. The effects of El Nino last winter were not favorable to the huckleberry crop this summer in the Pacific Northwest. After a record snowpack in the mountains in 2009, the winter of 2010 brought far less snow. The spring was especially wet with rain falling into late June. As a result, the resulting crop was far less than anticipated—the berries small and with a pronounced tartness. In Montana, State Wildlife officials reported that due to the poor huckleberry crop this year, a number of problematic bears came down off the mountains in search of food. Unfortunately, recorded encounters with humans were higher than normal and many of the attacks were attributed to bears looking for huckleberries. In just two weeks in September, at least five Grizzly bears that were searching for food were too close to humans and had to be captured. Four of the bears were released and one had to be humanely euthanized. Because of the unique environment in which it grows, mere mortals have never been able to successfully cultivate huckleberries on a commercial scale. Huckleberries grow on shrubs that can be little devils to reach—long sleeves are required—and the berries are small and delicate so they don’t naturally lend themselves to the commercial machines employed to harvest blueberries. Without a doubt, the huckleberry is a highly prized commodity to those of us who crave them in our pies, tarts, cakes and candies. Owing to the consideration of its wild nature, the fact it is only picked by hand and the miles it must endure to be brought off the mountains to the marketplace, the huckleberry is incredibly expensive. This year, a gallon bag of fresh huckleberries at the farmer’s market in Spokane sold for $35.00, literally a bargain. (A good year will yield a price of $50.00 per gallon). When I went to a food event in Las Vegas in late September, a Chef was serving small bites of smoked duck breast on dainty little toast points with a huckleberry relish. I told him what I paid for fresh, local huckleberries in Spokane. He winced. He didn’t tell me what the restaurant mark-up was for fresh huckleberries. Mr. Beard and the Huckleberry As we walked into the Portland Airport terminal building, a towering bald figure enrobed in a flowing black cape rushed past. Mother leaned down and asked, "Do you know who that was?" I was no more than 9 at the time and had no clue who he was. In a matter-of-fact tone that told me this must be a movie star, Mother simply said “that was James Beard.” In “Delights and Prejudices,” (1964, Gollancz), Beard wrote this about the huckleberry- “Blue huckleberries were the most elusive of the wild berries. They usually grew in places difficult to reach, in the midst of a mountain wilderness. But once you found a patch, you were in luck.” As I grew older and started to develop my own sensibilities for cooking and writing about food, I came to know James Beard. I never personally met Mr. Beard nor did I ever shake his hand, yet I know him. I share a common bond with James Beard, one that ties us to a special place. We are Native Oregonians. When I read his delicious writings, the voice of Beard takes me home as he relishes in the beauty of a crisp Bartlett Pear from the orchards of Hood River. I hear his footsteps as he walks on the wet sands of Gleneden Beach caressed by foam from the tides of the Pacific. And I know I’ve walked together with James Beard along this wondrous path of the huckleberry. “No matter how they were prepared—in a deep-dish pie, which we had often, or in a strange English version of the clafouti, with a batter poured over the berries and baked, or in little dumplings which were dropped into cooked huckleberries, or in the famous Hamblet huckleberry cake—they were fantastically good.” The Huckleberry Kitchen, the Old and New When one ponders the question of cooking with huckleberries, the natural inclination is to think of the same kinds of sweet dishes that Grandmother Ross kept in her wooden recipe box on hand-written index cards; jams, jellies and pies. Certainly those cherished family recipes have withstood the test of time, yet we should also consider new methods for pairing the huckleberry with ingredients and techniques that Grandmother Ross would not have had at her disposal in the kitchen at Prineville in 1929. A perfect example of adapting the huckleberry for today’s tastes is in a turnover: a pillow of flaky puff pastry enveloping a layer of cream-cheese resting under a dollop of silky huckleberry filling. When I competed in the Grande Finale of the MasterChef USA series on PBS, (the first “reality” cooking competition on American television), I crafted a purely Pacific Northwest menu—a starter of “Dungeness Crab Mosaic,” (crab, tomato, cucumber and pear cut into the shapes of a mosaic of tiles), with Marjoram Mayonnaise and Pear Chips -- fresh crab dip and chips if you will. The main course was “Cedar Plank Halibut, Mashed Potato, Garlic Broth and Frizzled Onions.” The dessert course had to be a stunner -- the dish that would define my path during the 13-week competition -- a dessert that would pay homage to the Northwest. I settled on a simple, humble sounding dessert: “Toasted Hazelnut Ice Cream with Huckleberry Compote.” The hazelnut, (we still prefer to call them “filberts” in our family), is a natural partner to the huckleberry since they both grow in the Northwest -- huckleberries on high mountain meadows and the hazelnut in orchards throughout the Valleys. However, the consideration of pairing huckleberries with nuts is more than one of geography. It’s a matter of the contrast and balance between flavors and textures. The huckleberry brings notes of sweet, tart fruit and the fragrance of perfume to a compote, while toasted hazelnuts lend an herbal, woodsy accent to cool vanilla ice cream. . My “Huckleberry Sundae” was the quintessential personality of the Northwest and it opened a new chapter in my journey along the path of the huckleberry. The huckleberry is equally adept in savory recipes like sauces fortified with stock, demi-glace or the spicy, black cherry notes of Pinot Noir. Wild game is a natural partner to the huckleberry. A rich venison stew with buttermilk biscuits slathered in salted butter and huckleberry jam is a rousing success at hunting camp. I personally favor thick slices of tender elk loin, quickly sautéed in butter and olive oil with just a bit of garlic, and then served with a few pebbles of fresh huckleberries tossed into the pan with a swirl of blackcurrant jelly and a swale of Calvados. The nutty, rich meats of game birds like quail, duck and goose also take well to the piquant flavor boost provided by the huckleberry. Squab wrapped in rashers of apple wood-smoked bacon and roasted no more than 12 minutes to tender the dark meat a hint beyond rare is unforgettable when served with a savory version of huckleberry compote. My favorite pairing combines huckleberries with foie gras. It was autumn a year ago and I had just prepared a batch of huckleberry compote to serve with a brace of Wild Scottish Red Leg Partridge when I came upon the inspiration that would lead to a new discovery. The thought was to stuff the little devils with a mixture of foie gras mousse studded with black truffles and breadcrumbs and then serve the birds with warm huckleberry compote. The day after the Scottish game feast, I was left with half a loaf of brioche, a small log of foie gras mousse and enough huckleberry compote to last through the Holidays. Yes! We‘ll make a sandwich! I began the making of the “sandwich” by slicing thin rounds of brioche no bigger than a few inches in diameter, then toasting them in a sauté pan swimming in butter. The “jelly” for the sandwich would be a layer of the savory huckleberry compote and the “butter” of the sandwich would be chilled slices of the unctuous foie gras mousse. The huckleberry “sandwich” was a revelation -- another dish I discovered along the path of the huckleberry. ‘Ischit Wiwnu’ Sleeps, Then Re-Awakens On a clear day in autumn, I return to Prineville. The chill from the approaching winter whispers through the thin branches of the poplar trees that border the lane to the farmhouse. Perched on a small bluff just to the East, I sit under the gnarled branches of a centuries-old juniper, looking West. The grassy scent of the last cutting of hay lingers in the air, reminding me of my Grandfather and his huckleberry pancakes. The fields are dotted with grazing Angus and Hereford that have been brought down for the winter from the summer pastures up on the Ochoco’s. The expansive view showcases the regal peaks of the Central Cascades—the Three Sisters, Broken Top, Three-Fingered Jack and Black Butte. Jutting toward heaven is majestic Mount Hood, a fresh coating of snow covering her summit. As I look toward Mount Hood I think of the story of the woman from the Warm Springs, filling her basket with huckleberries picked at the sacred grounds they called “Wiwlúwiwlu Taaktaak” -- the huckleberry meadows -- and it reminds me of my Grandmother and her huckleberry pie. I do not weep for the passing of the Seasons and the memories of a journey less travelled. I know that the end of autumn signals winter and a fresh blanket of snow will cover “Ischit Wiwnu.” The huckleberry will sleep and the path will be still. In the spring, “Ischit Wiwnu” will re-awaken and feel the drumbeat of a thousand footsteps. A new day will dawn and we will rejoice again along the path of the huckleberry.

* * *

David Ross lives in Spokane, but works a one-hour plane ride away. When he's not tending to his day job -- or commuting -- he writes about food, reviews restaurants and does food presentation. He is on the eGullet Society hosting team. Photos by the author.

Prince Edward Island is a dreamy place in the summer. Miles of sandy white beaches and delicate rocky red cliffs wrap their way around the small Atlantic province. You can pedal tip-to-tip along the Trans Canada Trail and marvel at the rows of flowering potato plants, or stop at a quaint teahouse for blueberry scones. Grab a bonnet and embrace your inner Anne Shirley with a shot of raspberry cordial and a walk through Green Gables.

When Labour Day passes and the riptide of Avonlea-obsessed tour buses subsides, people come for the Fall Flavours. The host of this province-wide food festival is chef and native son Michael Smith who says in the brochure “PEI is a food lover’s paradise, especially during harvest season when the fruits of our many passionate food artisans come to fruition.” I like the sound of that, and I like Michael Smith. For years I’ve watched him cook At Large, At Home, and Abroad. One episode had him cheffing for Canada’s lone NBA franchise, my beloved Toronto Raptors. At six-foot-seven he looked like a guard or possibly a small forward. More recently he was Bobby Flay’s challenger on Iron Chef America. Team Canada lost the Battle Avocado, but we’ll always have our hockey gold from the Vancouver Olympics.

The 2010 Fall Flavours boasted more than two hundred and fifty culinary events to choose from over four weeks.

“What should we do?” I asked my wife. “I’m thinking Culinary Boot Camp - Seafood 101. It’s a full day workshop at the Culinary Institute of Canada, and I get to keep the white coat.”

“That’s great, but what are me and the kids going to do?” she pointed out.

“We could all go to the Giant Bar Clam Dig & Cook-Out. What about the Charcuterie Curing and Smoking Class? That sounds like fun. Says here there’s a Festin Acadien avec Homard -- I like eating lobsters and speaking French. Or maybe we could try Shucking with Rick, whoever he is.”

Friday after work started packing for The Prince Edward Island International Shellfish Festival, billed as the "Biggest Kitchen Party in Atlantic Canada”. Although not listed as an Official Chef Michael Smith event, I was sure we’d run into him eventually. It’s not a big island and the man’s easily spotted in a crowd.

That weekend coincided with the 30th Annual Terry Fox Run meaning the family could cross the Confederation Bridge and raise funds for the fight against cancer. This impressive 13 km long concrete structure connects PEI to New Brunswick and it’s rarely opened up to foot traffic. Some exercise to counteract the impending seafood binge.

“We’re only going for one night, forget the roof rack. Say no to Michael Bublé.” Our bulbous luggage carrier from Wal-Mart has a name. Fortunately, the double jogging stroller and all our bags fit nicely into the back of the wagon. All set for an 8 a.m. departure.

First stop, coffee from Tim Hortons at Mastodon Ridge “conveniently located halfway between the equator and the North Pole”. The Ridge is named for the elephantine herbivores that roamed around in large herds until they were hunted to extinction 15,000 years ago. Several specimens have been unearthed in these parts -- I recall eating at a pub with a huge tusk hanging on the wall over the bar. I wonder what mastodon meat tasted like. I wonder if the proprietors realize that mastodon ivory has become a hot black market commodity and their tusk could be worth thousands. According to CBC Radio One, the receding glaciers have revealed enough fossil ivory to devalue the poached kind from Africa. Evidently, some Russian dude is buying it up, having it carved in India, then selling it in Europe.

For every Starbucks in Canada there are nine Tim Hortons. Coffee from the T-Ho is a reliable medium roast that tastes the same anywhere in the country. To order a cup with double cream and sugar in French, one can say “doub-double”. I carelessly ordered a “doobla-doo” last time I was in Quebec. My perky server smiled with her big brown eyes and repeated my words using a breathy French Canadian Scooby-Doo voice. The kids thought it was pretty funny.

Second stop, over the Cobequid Pass to Oxford, Nova Scotia. They claim the title “Wild Blueberry Capital of Canada”. To back it up there’s a cyanotic statue at the town’s entrance twelve feet in diameter with a sign that reads “Please keep off Blueberry to prevent injury”. We got some gas, a pint of berries and drove to Charlottetown.

Third stop, the Shellfish Festival. When we arrived at noon the Big Top was buzzing with people and seafood. The stage had an all-day line up of step-dancers, cloggers, fiddlers and folkies. No sign of Chef Michael but there were a few NHL hockey players from the Dallas training camp being held at the University up the road. The real Stars of the show were the local oysters and mussels, with lobster in a supporting role. Imagine a sloppy joe with lobster standing-in for the beef and a russet potato instead of a bun. Not much to look at but it sure hit the spot.

The presentation was fresh and simple with an array of toppings and sauces on the side. One guy was serving raw cherrystone clams on the half shell – a new and pleasant experience for me. Frankly, I was hoping to try some more unusual creatures. Where were the moon snails, whelks and razor clams? They were outside the tent in a saltwater petting zoo along with the starfish, urchins and sea cumbers. It seemed half the tank was trying to eat the other half. At least I picked up a few tips on how to find and prepare some of these critters at home. Razor clams are the hardest to catch because they burrow down in the sand faster than most people can dig. The solution is saline. One lad said to pump super salty water into the sand and watch them pop up like birthday candles on a cake. Good to know.

The beverage of choice for this daytime seafood extravaganza was the Unofficial National Cocktail called a Caesar, also known as a Clamdigger. It’s essentially a Bloody Mary where the beef broth has been replaced with clam juice. There was a busy Caesar station on site but it’s just not the same from a waxy paper cup, so I’ve included my own family recipe.

Rim a tall glass tumbler with lime juice & celery salt

2 shots of Alberta Vodka

1 dash each of Worcestershire & Tabasco

Fill with crushed ice and Mott’s Clamato juice

Garnish with celery and a straw

Sunday morning we did the Terry Fox. Pooped and peckish, we stopped for lunch on the way to the Wood Island Ferry.

“Does that sign say hamburger and soup $2.99?” I asked.

The curt reply was “No. Our soup today is hamburger.”

I guess they weren’t part of the Fall Flavours. We shared a big plate of poutine and waited for the boat back to Nova Scotia. The week prior Michael Smith was Chef On Board and cooked up a storm for the passengers, I later learned.

Shortly before the ferry docked people made their way down to the car deck. I buckled in the kids and inadvertently bumped the truck beside us with my backpack full of food tourist paraphernalia. There, inside that big green Toyota was The Man himself. I had so many questions. Chef Michael was reclined in his chair and engrossed in his hardcover book. He was probably hiding from people like me, so I did the polite Canadian thing and left him be. Maybe next year.

* * *

Peter Gamble is an eater, a husband and a father to 5-year old twins. His origins are in Toronto but he now runs a building design company from his home in Shad Bay, Nova Scotia.

Students of philosophy (of which I was one) rarely get through school without a class on the ancients, which often includes a day or so on the alchemists. If you’re not familiar with these guys, here’s what you need to know: they spent all their time looking for a magic element that would turn base metals to gold. Seriously. Sometimes this element is referred as “elixir” but mostly it’s known as the philosopher’s stone. Today, this seems like a fruitless and frivolous pursuit, but for hundreds of years the best minds in science were certain that it was only a matter of time before the philosopher’s stone would be discovered. Midas would be real.

I started thinking about the philosopher’s stone after reading a post on Michael Ruhlman’s blog about roasting a chicken. The subject of the post was that American commercial enterprise is conspiring to convince us all that it’s too hard to cook from scratch so that food manufacturers can sell us processed food. He chose roasted chicken as proof that it’s not hard to cook. With tongue ensconced in cheek, he wrote a set of instructions called “The World’s Most Difficult Roasted Chicken Recipe.”

“Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour . . . When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.”

Ruhlman is not the only one to champion roasted chicken as the quintessential easy meal. In the Les Halles Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain says: “. . . if you can't properly roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron. Take that apron off, wrap it around your neck and hang yourself. You do not deserve to wear the proud garment of generations of hardworking, dedicated cooks.”

Bourdain’s recipe for roasted chicken is, however, by no means easy. To start with, he has you lie down on the floor, bend your knees and bring your legs up, so you know how to position the chicken. Then, keeping that position in mind, you cut holes in your chicken and place the ends of the drumsticks in them (this so you don’t have to truss). You smear herb butter under the skin of the breast, and fill the cavity with herbs, onions and lemon pieces. Place the giblets and some more onion in the bottom of a roasting pan and pour some wine over it. Finally, the chicken goes on top of that and into the oven. But wait! You have to turn the temperature up halfway through cooking. Oh, and you baste, and then you have to make a pan sauce. Now, I’m sure all that work produces a decent roasted chicken, but easy? Call me a sorry-ass bivalve if you want, Tony, but I am damn sure not going to lie down on the floor imitating a dead chicken. Not in this lifetime. I went back to Ruhlman.

I don’t know if Ruhlman thought anyone would follow his directions; they seemed to be an afterthought to his post. But despite big gaps and some questionable instructions, I gave it a whirl and did exactly what he said, pretending that I knew nothing about chicken roasting. An hour and 15 minutes later I had a roasted chicken that was edible, so in that sense, it worked. It wasn’t good: it was overcooked, the skin was too salty, and the thighs were soaked in chicken grease. It yielded a hot scorched lemon, which I threw away. However, it was easy. (It would have been even easier without having to find fruits and vegetables for the cavity. What is it about lemons that makes people want to abuse them so tragically? Here’s a better use for a lemon: make a Sidecar and drink it while the fruit-free chicken cooks.)

I understand why Ruhlman says it’s easy to roast a chicken, why he wants -- even needs -- it to be easy. He’s taken it upon himself to prove that cooking isn’t hard. Chicken seems like a slam dunk. I also understand why Bourdain goes to such lengths in preparation. He thinks that all of those things make for a better bird, and since he starts out by ridiculing anyone who can’t produce a good roasted chicken, he’d be in serious trouble if he couldn’t deliver.

Other authors and chefs are not so quick to call roasted chicken easy, but neither will they come right out and call it difficult. They tend to be coy. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child and Simone Beck say, “You can always judge the quality of a cook or a restaurant by roast chicken.” Like those two dames de cuisine, most authors agree that a “perfectly roasted chicken” is a crown jewel of the kitchen, a feather in the cap of any serious cook. But no one admits the bare truth: you can’t have it both ways. If it’s easy, it can’t be the hallmark of a successful chef. If it makes or breaks the reputation of a restaurant or cook, then -- news flash -- it’s not going to be easy.

Paul Simon could just as easily have sung about 50 ways to roast a chicken (just slit it up the back, Jack; throw it in a pan, Stan; learn how to truss, Gus). Before you get that bird anywhere near an oven, you have to make decisions. Do you brine it? Salt it? Rub, butter or marinate it? If you butter, does it go on the outside, or under the skin? Plain or herbed? What, if anything, goes inside the chicken? Then comes trussing: you can tie the legs together loosely or you can draw them up tightly so they almost cover the breast. (Or do nothing.) Even putting the poor chicken in a pan is problematic. Deep or shallow pan? Rack or no rack? Vegetables under it, or not? Next, when you get it to the oven, what temperature do you use? Not only can you can roast at high temperature or low, but you can start out low and turn it to high, or start out high and turn it to low. But you’re not done yet: baste? Don’t baste?

Whew.

You might think you’ll get definitive answers if you turn to the experts, but agreement among them is as elusive as phlogiston. The recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking has you salt the inside of the bird, butter the inside and outside, place the bird on a bed of vegetables, start it out at a high temperature, turning and basting for 15 minutes. Turn the oven down and continue to baste and turn. Somewhere in there, you salt the outside of the chicken. James Beard has a similar method of turning and basting, but before cooking, he has you rub the inside of the chicken with lemon juice, seal a chunk of butter inside, and sew the chicken shut.

Alton Brown suggests building a “stone oven” from fire-safe tiles inside your real oven, heating it up with the oven cleaning setting, then enclosing the chicken in the tile box to roast it. (Yeah, right after I get up off the floor from my chicken-yoga exercise, Alton.)

The lemons-in-the-cavity idea originates with Marcella Hazan. In her recipe, however, you don’t toss the fruit in haphazardly. You must roll a pair of lemons on the counter and prick their skins all over with a skewer, then pack them into the cavity as tightly as commuters on the 5:25 train. As the chicken cooks, the lemons heat up and spray the inside of the bird with hot lemon juice. Apparently, this is a good thing.

Heston Blumenthal trumps all others for length and complexity. He has you brine the bird for six hours, then rinse and soak for an hour, changing the water every fifteen minutes. You bring a pot of water to a boil and prepare an ice bath. Dunk the chicken into the boiling water for 30 seconds, then into the ice water. Repeat, as if you’re trying to sober up a drunken sailor. Put your recovering bird to bed on a rack and cover it with muslin, letting it dry out in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, preheat the oven to 140°F and cook the bird for four to six hours, or until a thermometer in the meat reaches 140 degrees (by some accounts this can take even longer -- there are tales of cooking for twelve hours). Let it sit for an hour. Then brown the chicken all over in oil in a heavy skillet. Meanwhile, you've chopped up and cooked the wing tips in 100 grams of butter. The final step is to inject this chicken-flavored butter into the bird in several places.

Every cookbook author in the world, it seems, has a special way with roasted chickens. Some have more than one -- Thomas Keller is on record with at least four methods, from “salt it, truss it, throw it in a hot oven” (wherein he says, “I don't baste it, I don't add butter; you can if you wish, but I feel this creates steam, which I don't want”), to the Ad Hoc version of roasting the bird on a bed of vegetables -- after rubbing it with oil. What? If Keller can’t make up his mind about how to roast a chicken, what hope do we mere mortals have?

In the French Laundry Cookbook, Keller says, “. . . even a perfectly roasted chicken will inevitably result in a breast that’s a little less moist than one you would roast separately, which is why I always want a sauce with roast chicken . . .” Had he ever taken a logic class, he would have recognized the inherent contradiction in that sentence. For what he’s said is this: “even a perfectly roasted chicken is <i>not perfect</i>.”

And there we have it: there is no method that results in perfect roasted chicken. It’s the philosopher’s stone of the modern kitchen. All the lemon-stuffing, trussing, turning, basting, and temperature manipulation in the world won’t change that. Blumenthal spends two days brining, rinsing, boiling, chilling, drying, cooking, and searing -- and he still has to inject butter into the chicken meat. Lie down on the floor and become one with your chicken, build a citrus Jacuzzi inside your bird, or massage it with butter like a pampered spa client. At the end of the day, you still won’t have gold.

All those chefs know the reasons why. First, chicken thighs and breasts need different treatment, and any method that cooks them the same way, at the same temperature, for the same time, risks overcooking and thus drying out the breast by the time the thighs are done. Second, treatments designed to keep the breast meat moist, such as brining or cooking at lower temperatures, result in disappointing skin. And of course, the main point of roasted chicken is the crisp, brown skin. But you need to achieve it without ruining the rest of the chicken.

They know this and we do too, if we’ve put much effort into roasting chickens. Yet we persist. We keep trying to roast these birds whole, trussing and turning, brining and basting. Why?

It’s the size. Chickens are small. Along with turkeys, they’re the only whole animal most of us will ever cook in a modern kitchen.

If cows were the size of chickens, would we roast them whole, wondering all the while why those legs are so tough and the loins all dried out? Maybe so; maybe if cows were chicken-sized, we’d find a familiar myriad of misdirection: stuffing them with lemons, trussing them up, starting them on their stomachs, then flipping them udder-side up, swerving from high to low heat and careening back. But cows are not the convenient two- to four-pound size of chickens, so we cut them up and treat the parts appropriately.

On the other hand, if chickens were the size of cows, we’d know how to handle them. We’d butcher them and cook the various parts the way they deserve. We wouldn’t roast a whole one. We’d put that search for the poultry philosopher’s stone behind us.

I know what you’re saying. “But a perfect roasted chicken is not impossible. I had one in 1997.” I myself have had two roasted chickens that -- if not perfect -- were so close to perfection as to be indistinguishable from it. One was at Alain Ducasse’s Essex House restaurant in New York. It was one of the special French chickens with blue feet (or so it said so on the menu; it arrived at the table footless). It had shaved black truffles under the skin. It was breathtaking. The second I actually made myself. A friend showed me how to use the charcoal grill that had been abandoned in the backyard of my rental flat, and also showed me how to cut out the backbone to spatchcock the bird. Brined and grilled, it was flawless.

But a major scientific principle is that results have to be replicable to count. If you can’t get the same results from an experiment after the first time, then -- scientifically speaking -- your results might as well have never happened. And that’s where all these philosopher-stone attempts fail. Yes, that first chicken I spatchcocked and grilled was awe-inspiring. But the next time? It was good, but there was no comparison. I kept trying, but I never again reached that pinnacle. Anyone who’s had a roasted chicken that neared perfection knows what I mean.

Oh, sure. You can fool yourself that because the chicken you had back in 1997 was perfect, it must have been the cooking method, and you can religiously follow that method for the rest of your life. You can pretend that all the subsequent chickens cooked by that method are as good as that first one. But you’d be lying. Perfect roasted chicken is more than the bird itself. It depends on a confluence of elements that only happens once. My ADNY chicken was perfect not just because of the quality of the bird and the truffles under the skin; it was perfect because I had it at my first visit to a really high-end restaurant, because I was with wonderful friends, because we stayed at the table for four hours while servers doted on us. My grilled chicken was perfect because for the first time in my life, I mastered a charcoal fire and spatchcocked a chicken by myself.

So, maybe you have had a perfect roasted chicken. Dream about it and count your blessings, but don’t ever expect it to happen again.

We live in the real world. Perfect roasted chicken moments may happen, but rarely more than once, and not to all of us. What are the rest of us supposed to do if we want roasted chicken?

Paul Simon said it best: The answer is easy if you take it logically.

Think of a chicken as a four-pound cow with wings. Get over the idea that roasting a whole chicken is a worthwhile pursuit and recognize it for the philosopher’s stone that it is. Save your time and sanity: roast thighs, which really are easy, or breasts, which take a little more care and preparation but are still not difficult. Before you try lemons, trussing, butter, fire bricks, or a two-day brining-dunking-drying-cooking-searing-injecting binge, take a deep breath. Cut that chicken up and don’t look back.

Get yourself free.

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And yet.

That ADNY bird was incredible. So was my first grilled chicken. They weren’t figments of my imagination. What’s more, I made one of them. Why shouldn’t I be able to do it again? It wasn’t that difficult, really. Just brine, then remove the backbone. Start a fire.

Yes, I know what I said. The second time the magic was gone. But what if I’m just forgetting something, or what if one little change would elevate my next chicken to those heights? I’m sure I can do it. Maybe I could buy a blue-footed chicken and a truffle.

No. I won’t get obsessed. Besides, simpler is better. I know that. I’ll do what I did before, but I’ll pay more attention to the temperature and the time, and that’s it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go back to roasting thighs.

Wait, I know -- I could rub some butter under the skin. Everyone swears by that. But that’s all I’ll do. I’m not going to get insane over this.

But maybe I could dry it overnight so the skin stays crisp. What if I put some butter and herbs inside the chicken and then trussed it?

I have some lemons . . .

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Janet A. Zimmerman (aka JAZ) is a food writer and culinary instructor based in Atlanta, Georgia, and a Bert Greene award winner for her <i>Daily Gullet</i> article "Any Other Name." She is an eGullet Society manager.

I believe I’ve said elsewhere, more than once, OK more than let’s say, twice, that soup is my favorite food. Something about its fluid sapidity splashing across all taste sensors at the onct, I suppose -- subtlety (or extreme heat) of a broth, savoryness of a smooth puree (or chunky mélange), snappy saline creaminess of a chowder or restrained smoky umami of shiro miso. Really, all kinds, but soup made entirely of vegetables is what concerns me today.

Concerns me many days, you could say, because I make it a lot. Always have, but with increased regularity since we’ve been eating veg two nights a week. We eat veg fairly often anyways, just works out that way, but for all sorts of reasons that everyone is familiar with so NO need to post a litany of them. Here it’s been a goal. An easily-met goal, may I say, which is a major bonus.

Aside from those alluded-to yet not explicated reasons there are also those that don’t appear on lists nearly often enough but are fully as compelling. Here’s one: I LOVE VEGETABLES. For me there is no cooking, no good cooking, without vegetables as the foregoing central focus. I get a weird excited feeling inside when regarding the offerings of my friends the farmers at the farmers’ market not unlike the one I used to get perusing the Vogue Designer Originals section of the Vogue Patterns book.

Another has developed over the years I’ve been cooking: A tendency to seek subtlety as often as takes-off-the-top-of-my-head bombast. Oh I have nothing against bombast, God knows, and pride myself on my heat tolerance, for example, but there is beauty and value also, maybe more so, in catching a light, elusive, upper-palate flavor and really tasting it.

From the start my vegetable-soup jag was not an exercise in privation, but rather creating an opportunity to shoe-horn more vegetables from my friends the farmers into a week’s aggregate menus, while at the same time without even trying simultaneous-like collaterally satisfying Those Reasons Which Shall Remain Unenumerated.

My soup varies in its constituent makeup and is descended in my cooking from Madeleine Kamman’s classic garbure, which I like to make but is not 100% veg and a bit more of a catch-all, in fact is the best way to make use of refrigerator odds & ends. Something is owed to familiar old minestrone too, and in that way there is no reason there couldn’t be beans and small soup pasta. Sometimes my soup takes a borschy bent, as when Ivan craves his native beet-cabbage-potato flavor profile, with sour cream, and fresh dill if he’s lucky, at serving. There is often cabbage, even without the beets; I try to buy my $1 cabbage (which is sometimes $1.50) every week. People: buy yourself a cabbage.

Often potato, though not always. Always at least a little carrot, I’ve been having kind of a thing with the mature gorgeous carrots from one of my favorite veg vendors for a couple of years now and there’s always at least one in the fridge. Celery, maybe, fennel bulb, frequently. Leafy greens, even the outer leaves of Romaine that didn’t make it into salades. Kohlrabi, purple, white, pale green. Green beans. Squash, winter or summer. And onion family, come on down: Just now the giant fresh onions of springtime are so delicious, but there is nothing at all wrong with a brown winter onion, neither. Or leeks. Or the 1/2 bunch of scallions kicking around. Overripe, or under-, for that matter, tomato. A clove or two of garlic.

Whether I’ve purpose-bought or am gleaning from what’s in stock, I take a gander at what I’ve got, and prep commences. In the universe I create in my Veg Soup, everything is chopped to the same size. Sometimes larger dice, sometimes smaller, but I have a real bugaboo about things not cut to the same size in some preparations. This is one. There should be quite a lot of raw veg -- the reduction in volume during cooking is astounding even for solid-seeming stuff. Onion is set to sauté with some butter, some oil. Could SO easily be all olive oil and then hey presto it’s vegan. Garlic is added after some time, doesn’t need much sautéing. Unlike the onion, whose golden brown will inform the entire soup in a very good way, the garlic’s contribution will come during the simmer as it softens and dissolves.

When the onions are golden brown and the garlic is in, the rest of the prepared veg can go, and get seasoned with salt and pepper and a hit of cayenne and stirred a few minutes until everything is sizzling. This is the first chance to NOT underseason, the first and the most important. So, don’t. Add water to cover, plus -- not by several inches, maybe one inch. I like plain water, rather than vegetable stock, which could certainly be used. The subtle fresh broth that results just from the vegetables in the mix is one of the main points, to me. Liquidity will be adjusted later; less is better during cooking for extracting the vegetables’ essences without destroying their structural integrity. Simmer, covered, until everything is very very very tender. Longer and slower is better than faster and hotter -- better for flavor, better for texture. As things start to get tender, be ready to season again.

At times I put in herbs, what I felt like or what was burgeoning in the garden, but honestly I think it’s better without. Herbs can be very strong, even fresh ones in judicious quantity. Parsley stems, I have liked, when I made a celery-dominant version after Ivan and I had sort of an O. Henry celery story at the farmers’ market; he thought he was supposed to get celery, I thought I was, so we each did. Parsley stems, if you have the Gigantica variety especially, support celery in a way that makes so much sense to the palate that the combination must be as old as stone. Another of Ivan’s favorites, the celery version.

When all is very tender (this is not a crunchy-vegetable trip), and one has stinted neither on the salt nor the black pepper, i.e. seasoning has been adjusted as we say euphemistically but which really just means DO NOT STINT ON THE SALT, we can call the soup done.

With it we always have bread, sometimes a toasted crouton with or without cheese in the bottom of the bowl or on the side, or the fantastic rustic multi-grain from the Japanese-French baker, sometimes a bread I have made. This first round we eat as it is, clear broth with the veg dice. For a second meal, I sometimes puree and add a little cream (and need I say it, seasoning.) With the addition of cream, several minutes’ simmering is necessary to activate, and pepper might need checking. If you reach critical mass with black pepper you can get away with minimal cream for maximum creamy effect. Not enough pepper and you can add lashing after lashing and it’ll never taste as creamy.

I think I might prefer the puree. Might be the cream, might be the flavor development over a day or two in the old Cambro. Or might be I finally apprehend the flowery ethereality that’s been in there all along.

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Priscilla writes from a Southern California canyon with desultorily paved roads and pleasantly anachronistic cultural lag, and is the founder of hyperlocal, Orange County-centric OCFoodNation.com.

It’s never inspired a wild fandango, let alone cartwheels 'cross the floor. Calling it Béchamel doesn’t make it chic and rolling the "l"s in balsamella won’t make it sexy. It’s White Sauce, pale, pure and reliable, the Vestal Virgin of Escoffier’s Mother Sauces.

It’s a Mama sauce, a Maman sauce, a Mom and Mummy sauce. There’s no macaroni and cheese, no creamed spinach, no creamed potatoes or onions without White Sauce. No lasagna, no rissoles; barely a scalloped potato. No soufflés. No crap on clapboard. No sauce for chicken-fried steak or salmon patties. No choufleur gratinée or cute little coffins of chicken a la King. No éclairs, cream puffs, or Boston Cream Pie, because isn’t pastry cream white sauce with sugar, egg and vanilla?

In this order, place butter, flour and milk in a saucepan, some salt, maybe a twist of beige from the nutmeg grinder -- all it calls for is some attention with the wooden spoon and an eye to the size and activity of the bubbles. The proportions are way simpler than the multiplication flashcards my father drilled me with in third grade. My mother called them out over her shoulder as she chopped parsley and cleaned the big can of salmon.

I remember: “One tablespoon each of butter and flour for thin, two for medium, three for thick. Keep stirring. Watch the heat -- you don’t want to burn it.” Some Maternal Units would never besmirch the snowy stuff with black pepper -- though not my mother, Julia Child was passionate about the white pepper only rule. I like the black specks, (always) a grating of nutmeg, and (often) a pinch of cayenne. When I have extra time I add a fillip of my own: I throw a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a few fresh tarragon leaves into the milk, warm it up to the small bubble stage, then let it cool down and infuse. I strain out the herbs before I add the milk to the roux, pondering the greatness of the bouquet garni, and what a clever cook I am.

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It will surprise no one who buys that story that all French cooking started as Italian cooking that Catherine di Medici‘s Italian cooks introduced it to the French when she married Henri II in 1533. Well, could be -- but why do Italians call it balsamella, not caterina? Larousse Gastronomique relates the tale of Louis de Béchameil, Marquis de Nointel, who got a plum job as Louis XIV’s Steward of the Royal Household. "The invention of béchamel sauce is attributed to him, but it had, no doubt, been known for a long time under another name. It was more likely to be the invention of a court chef who must have dedicated it to Bechemeil as a compliment."

And who was Louis’s chef de cuisine? You might have heard of him: a chap by the name of Varenne. Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678) included a recipe for Sauce Béchamel in his Le Cuisiner Francais. I wonder if it was a printing error in the first edition that dropped the "i" in the Marquis’s name? (One hopes the Marquis was flattered enough to give Francois a shift off.)

My research was heaped on the kitchen table (otherwise known as my study). I pulled books from the stack at random, checking recipes. The room hummed harder; the ceiling of my self-respect as a food historian flew away. Careme’s formula for a white roux and milk sauce reads like a formula for papier mache binder. He starts with a veloute made from white veal stock then pumps it up with a liaison of eggs yolks and cream, a walnut-sized piece of butter and "a few tablespoons of very thick double cream to make it whiter. Then add a pinch of grated nutmeg, pass it though a white tammy [sic] and keep hot in a bain marie."

While Escoffier was wowing London, Charles Ranhofer was chef de everything at Delmonico’s in New York; the late nineteenth century’s Achatz, Keller and Waters combined. He was a white-whiskered tyrant with more energy than a grill cook at the Billy Goat Tavern under Wacker Drive. Here’s his take on béchamel, on page 293 of his 1183-page master opus The Epicurean:

"This is made by preparing a roux of butter and flour, and letting it cook for a few minutes while stirring, not allowing it to color in the slightest; remove it to a slower fire and leave it to complete cooking for a quarter of an hour, then dilute it gradually with half boiled milk and half veal blond. Stir the liquid on the fire until it boils, then mingle in with it a mirepoix of roots and onions, fried separately in butter, some mushroom peelings and a bunch of parsley; let it cook on a slower fire and let cook for twenty-five minutes without ceasing to stir so as to avoid its adhering to the bottom; it must be rather more consistent than light. Strain it through a fine sieve then through a tammy [sic] into a vessel."

Not content with the veal presence and the mushroom peelings, Ranhofer adds a mirepoix of root vegetables? Will the madness never end?

Let’s jump ahead another thirty years and hop the train from Manhattan to Boston to check out cooking school of Mrs. Fanny Merrit Farmer, and her The Boston Cooking School Cookbook -- my edition’s from 1913. Fanny infuses a cup and a half of veal stock with carrots, onion, bay leaf, parsley and peppercorns for twenty minutes. (So much for any pretensions to originality I may have had about steeping a few herbs in the milk.) "Melt the butter, add flour, and gradually hot stock and milk. Season with salt and pepper."

James Peterson’s recipe in Glorious French Food (2002) requires shallots, celery, a carrot, a garlic clove, thyme, bay leaf and "4 oz. (115 g.) of prosciutto end, pancetta or veal and pork trimmings." C’mon Jim, am I making a sauce or a stuffing for ravioli?

The Rombauer Ladies don’t include a recipe for béchamel in the 1975 Joy of Cooking. If you look it up in the index you’ll find “Bechamel sauce, see White Sauce.” You know, the recipe with the roux and milk and salt and pepper? What I’ve called Béchamel since I was a hoity-toity teenager in the kitchen? Maybe Joy set the modern formula for Béchamel in this country; it’s awesome they called it White Sauce.

If there’d been a waiter with a tray, I would have called out for another drink. I felt like someone who’d spent her life telling people how to make pate by grinding up Spam, or insisting that Mario Batali heats up Chef Boy-R-Dee at home when he wants pasta that’s really authentic. Or a schoolmarm who’d been teaching creationism forever, saw the light, and realized she’d been talking out of her ass for years with her skirt tucked into the waistband of her pantyhose. Had I never made a Béchamel?

Eventually, I found the writer who, for the first time, called White Sauce Béchamel. I’ll give you a hint: the year was 1961. Want another? Her kitchen is on view in the Smithsonian. You got it: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, a tome with a treasured spot in my not-Smithsonian-sized cooking library. Julia, Louisette and Simka are my first in-house references for "plain" Béchamel Sauce. But: in a preface about Sauces Blanches, the Gourmettes say, "Sauce Béchamel in the times of Louis XIV (yeah, Varenne) was a more elaborate sauce then it is today. Then it was a simmering of milk, veal and seasonings with an enrichment of cream. In modern French cooking a béchamel is a quickly made milk-based foundation requiring only the addition of butter, cream, herbs or other flavorings to turn it into a proper sauce." Then they provide a recipe that mentions neither butter nor cream nor herbs, nor other flavorings.

And now that there is no reason and the truth is plain to see: the word “Béchamel” will never again pass my lips. I’ve never known squat about real Béchamel: I’ve known about White Sauce.

I woke early, as I always do on that particular Sunday, and made a quick breakfast of juices, homemade pancakes and local strawberries. My boys and their friends crawled out of their beds, dressed, and ate like trenchermen -- all the while discussing last night’s valuable trinket acquisitions and opportunities for the same over the next twelve hours.

Once everyone was fed and the dishes were sort of done, we headed out the door towards St. Charles Ave, a block and a half away from my house. The Sunday before Mardi Gras on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans has, for a very long time, been pretty much the same. Families gather at nearby houses for early meals and relaxing early morning libations. Aromas of gumbo, grilling meats, red beans, chicken sauce piquant and other delicacies, easily transportable and even more easily fed to large number of revelers, fill the air up and down the seven or so miles of the parade route. Groups magically fill the Avenue in the early morning hours, staking out their spots and setting up for a very long day of fun and food. (Yesterday the first parades began at eleven and ended well after eleven, delayed by the inconvenient relationship between giant man-made floats and even larger, God-made, live oak trees.)

The scene when we arrived was pretty amazing. A block of St. Chuck that just seven hours before had been strewn with debris from the previous evening’s parades had been tidied up by magic cleaning gnomes and repopulated by families in the full swing of BBQ, Bloody Marys and the day’s first cool ones. Children of all ages threw foam footballs in the streets, generally acting like kids with a day off and only moderately attentive supervision. Groups of self-important and seriously preening teen girls roamed St. Charles in search of cute guys, who were making sure to ignore them until the microsecond that the girls passed by. Then the cute guys indulged in the age old sport of carefully paying attention while not paying attention to the members of the opposite sex.

Pickups were parked on the side streets, their beds filled with, variously, BBQ pits, couches, port o’ johns, prep tables, ice chests, crawfish boiling setups, and just about anything else one might possibly need during a long day of fun at the parades. These setups ranged from what, clearly, were last minute arrangements, to full-on catering operations that would put many, more professional, caterers to shame.

On the tailgate of one truck, there were two guys shucking fresh, very cold, very salty oysters. I stopped to chat with them and within, oh, let’s say, five seconds, I was invited to sample a few. These few turned into about twenty-four in pretty short order. Nice guys, those oyster guys. They invited me back for a few grilled oysters later in the day -- enticing me with the claim that their grilled oysters would make those poseurs at Drago’s wish they had their secret recipe. I promised I’d return later in the evening, knowing that the chances were slim that a) I would be on that part of the route later in the day b) that they would have any oysters left and c) that, if there were any oysters left I would likely be shucking them as those guys were already, at eleven a.m., fast approaching the coordination danger zone that often occurs when beer and oyster knives meet. But you can’t predict what a Carnival Sunday will bring so I didn’t turn them down.

My boys met up with some friends at 1st and St. Charles and I got them squared away with the friends’ parents, swapped cell phone numbers, the general plan for the next few hours, and sampled a few of the snacks they’d laid out on a couple of tables covered with garish LSU tablecloths -- Tulane logos are much more tasteful. The remains of a lovely brunch held earlier in the day at a nearby home had been duly delivered to the parade route: all kinds of good cheeses, some canapés consisting of very large shrimp and remoulade sauce, a nice gumbo z’herbes, and lots of French bread. There were also pitchers of fresh juice, milk punch (in a silver pitcher -- and being poured into silver beakers), Bloody Marys, soft drinks, and, if you were up to it, an entire bar set up. It might sound as if these people had gone a bit overboard, but there were probably 2000 folks with more or less the same setups along the parade route. It’s about sharing and having fun on the Avenue, and we are, if nothing else, pretty good at sharing and having fun. Gracious, effortless hospitality is what we do here and what we’ve always done. If you can’t find any friends anywhere in the world, come to New Orleans during Carnival week and you’ll probably make some for life.

Once the boys were squared away I walked uptown about fifteen blocks to meet some friends at General Taylor and St. Charles, just down the block from the Columns Hotel, and directly across from Rayne Episcopal Methodist Church. This Mardi Gras season the church is surrounded by a chain-link fence, necessitated by the fact that the very tall, very old, and very grand steeple on the sanctuary blew off during the storm and the church is only now beginning repairs.

My friends, who are, unlike me, very organized, had gone out in the middle of the night and secured the spot by placing a couple of tables, some chairs, a few ladders, and other parade accoutrement on the side of the street. The stuff was left there with the hope that it would still be there when they returned in the morning -- and it was.

Much like the gentlefolk up the street where I’d left the boys, my friends were enjoying a pretty elaborate spread, though this one was accompanied by decent champagne poured into plastic flutes. It was all very civilized.

Just down the block, I saw a friend of a friend slaving over a couple of burners and some cast iron pots. I walked down to say hello and to scope out the food. He’d just hit the serving stage of an excellent duck and andouille gumbo that had been concocted, roux and all, right there on the spot. He’d been out since about seven in the morning and was pretty well as done as the gumbo. He offered me a bowl of the stuff and some really great bread from Boulangerie, the excellent French Bakery on Magazine Street. I looked around for a place to sit, spied an empty folding chair, and plopped down to eat. Inside of two minutes, an older woman, very tiny and very cute in her carnival finery, walked up and informed me that I was in her chair -- but that it would be okay to stay if I’d introduce her to “the gumbo man” and help her acquire a bowl for herself. I got her some gumbo and we both sat down and enjoyed the rich soup, chatting like old friends even though we’d just met. In the tradition here, it took her only three moves to figure out that she actually knew who my (long passed away) grandparents were and that her son had gone to Tulane with my Dad. I wasn’t surprised -- it happens here all the time. Instead of the usual, “What do you do for a living?” it’s “Tell me again, who are your Mama and Daddy?”

Once I’d completed old home week, the parade was in full swing and I rejoined my friends. This was a pretty typical Mardi Gras group -- old New Orleanians, out-of-towners there for their umpteenth carnival, and people visiting New Orleans for their first parade weekend. All of us had an equally good time, acting like fools and begging people riding by on the floats for tiny plastic trinkets and the occasional “big score.” The throws vary from cheap plastic beads to very valuable (at least for the next few days) stuffed animals, spears, cups, and toilet paper with the Krewe logo embossed on every super--absorbent sheet. Successful grabs were marked by the laughing recipient holding the prize high and showing it off triumphantly. This behavior went on, this particular Sunday, for more than twelve hours, thanks to an Endymion parade that had been rescheduled from the previous night because of inclement weather. This Sunday was one for the record books in New Orleans -- more floats rolled down St. Charles Avenue than on any other Sunday in history. In this post Katrina world, it seemed to make it a very important and historical event, even though it was caused by an unforeseen overnight rain shower

That evening, just as the last Bacchus float passed, there was a delay in the parades and I was feeling pretty worn out. I quietly said goodbye to my friends, new and old, and started the long trudge home. As I walked down St. Charles, I realized that I was feeling a bit peckish -- and remembered the oystermen at the corner of Thalia and St. Charles. I knew my chances were slim, but it had been a very lucky day. I decided to walk an extra block and see if there were some grilled oysters at the ready. I lucked out. The grill was smoking, and as I walked up the oysterguys (who by this point could also be known as the “going to be really hung over on Monday guys”) yelled out that they’d been waiting on me and to hurry up. They said that they were running out and didn’t want me to miss out on the planet’s best grilled oysters. Never one to disappoint a bragging chef, I sat down in the offered chair and scarfed up six on the half-shell, grilled with butter, chopped garlic, Worcestershire, and Crystal Hot Sauce. Now, I’m a lover of Drago’s finely grilled bivalves, but the guys were right -- their oysters were absolutely delicious. Oysters have rarely come to such a worthy end.

I made sure to find out if they were coming back (yes, on Tuesday, all day) and bade them a good night. As I walked the quiet side street back to my home, the only sounds to be heard were of a distant, soon to pass parade. I was full, happy, and feeling some hope for this place, my city that is so unlike anywhere else on the planet.

Sure -- absolutely -- the place is a mess. Just a two-block walk to the other side of St. Charles Avenue from my house will put you square into no-man’s land -- a place that is still, even six months later, largely uninhabited and shows few signs of recovery. Most of the city is like that, though the older parts, the parts built on the high ground, are coming along remarkably well. There are burned-out buildings, abandoned or closed businesses, cars that haven’t been moved in months, streetlights that don’t, and might never, work, and many, many other constant reminders of the disaster that happened here last August 29th. The parts of the city that are operating and habitable are coming back remarkably well -- though it’s only about a quarter of the city in terms of both land mass and population. There are parts of town that, no matter what your political stance on the issue, will probably have to be razed before any practical rebuilding effort can occur. It’s a mess, that’s the one thing here that’s for sure.

Much of the city will take years to repair, and much of it, in fact, may never be repaired. What that storm couldn’t kill, what ten Katrinas can’t kill, is us. We’re still here. More and more of us are coming back every day, and we’ll keep coming back as long as we can find a job and a place to live. This is our home. The Feds won’t send us the money because they don’t get it and we’re off of the front pages because the most of the media don’t get it -- but that’s OK. We get it. It’s the people, it’s the food, it’s the people and the food. It’s Mardi Gras, it’s Jazz Fest, it’s strong coffee, it’s red beans and rice, it’s Bloody Marys in the middle of the street at eight in the morning. It’s your mama and them’s house, and mostly, it’s everything that makes us what we are. We live in New Orleans and we don’t want to live anywhere else.

It might not be right, and it might not fit neatly into most people’s “normal” slot, but we’re good with it. We like us.

The rest of the stuff? The infrastructure? It’ll get fixed. Eventually. We’ll start next Wednesday morning. Just as soon as we wake up.

Brooks Hamaker (aka Mayhaw Man) is a freelance writer living in New Orleans. He hopes that all of his neighbors can come home soon.

Photo by Sara Roahen, whose untitled memoir about a Yankee discovering New Orleans' unique food culture will be published in 2007 (W.W. Norton).]]>83883Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:10:19 +0000A Pineapple and a Candied Cherryhttps://forums.egullet.org/topic/133133-a-pineapple-and-a-candied-cherry/by David Ross Recently, I had dinner with a friend at a funky Seattle café that follows today’s popular farm-to-table movement, sourcing only local, seasonal ingredients from small farmers who ply their trade organically, with the Chef crafting those products into simple, comfort-food style menus that change weekly. The storefront restaurant was housed in a building that had been given new life in one of Seattle’s resurgent urban neighborhoods. From the outside, it looked like a 1930’s travel postcard hand-painted in pastel colors. The staff numbered two -- the chef and a waitress -- and the tiny little dining area had no more than five tables. The focal point of the room was a 1960’s-era wood stereo cabinet boasting a small collection of albums from the days when spinning vinyl LP’s were how we listened to music. Tony Bennett’s All-Time Greatest Hits (1972) spun during dinner. (At the time, we were the only customers in the place, so we weren’t worried about offending other patrons with a scratchy rendition of “Love Look Away.”) The setting was perfect for ending dinner on a sweet note with a “vintage” dessert appropriate to the retro stereo, the décor of the room, and the vibe of the neighborhood. We settled on the “Hazelnut Bundt Cake” served with fresh “Honey Ice Cream,” a confection that would have been comfortable reposing on a luncheonette counter in the mid-60’s, (although back then we would have called it a “Filbert Bundt Cake”). What came to the table was a meek, withered slab of cake; the only redeeming part of the presentation was a cool scoop of golden honey ice cream. A heavy hand with the hazelnuts overpowered the delicate balance of the the cake, rendering it dry and gummy. A thin veil of powdered-sugar glaze did nothing to rescue it from the dry depths of despair. We turned to the ice cream, hoping it would earn the dish a passing grade, but something had gone terribly wrong in the process of crafting the ice cream. Little ice crystals had formed throughout the custard. Instead of smooth, silky, sweetness, our plea was rebuffed with a mouth of cold sand. The Chef had made some glaring errors in technique and the results were embarrassing. The urge to use the season’s first fresh hazelnuts in strict accordance with the restaurant’s mission of “farm-to-table” had resulted in a cake so disappointing that it wouldn’t even merit the back table at your local elementary school cakewalk. No doubt, responsibly raised bees and an organic hazelnut orchard are beautiful things to behold. But sitting in that little café in a building erected decades ago, listening to the bluesy sounds of Tony Bennett, I wasn’t thinking so much about today’s “farm-to-table” culture as much as I was imagining a slice of one of America’s favorite cakes and what a delightful ending to this meal, in this quaint, cozy little setting, it would have been. Unfortunately, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake wasn’t on the menu.

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Pineapple Upside-Down Cake once shared Formica-lined diner counters with other luminaries of the cake world like the “Burnt-Sugar Cake with 7-Minute Frosting,” the “Strawberry Bavarian Icebox Cake,” and the often-praised “7-Up Angel Food Cake with Pink Lady Whipped Cream.” It’s impossible to document the precise day that the first slice of Pineapple Upside-Down Cake was served. We do know that it’s a youngster in the history of cake, with its likely roots in the roaring 20’s. It’s a quintessentially American cake -- the product of innovation by an entrepreneurial spirit with both business and agricultural interests who developed methods for growing, harvesting and canning pineapple on a commercial scale never before seen. Mr. James Drummond Dole (1877-1958) is widely known as the “Pineapple King.” Armed with an impressive educational resume from Harvard (degrees in both agriculture and business), Dole moved from his home in New England to Hawaii in 1899 and invested in a 64-acre farm on the island of Oahu. Commercial pineapple canneries of the time employed hundreds of workers to harvest fruit in the fields. Hand labor continued in the canneries where the pineapples had to be peeled and cored by hand. Dole introduced automation, changing the face of the industry. Prior to Mr. Dole’s innovations, the thought of a Midwestern family in the Midwest enjoying a fresh Hawaiian pineapple would have been absurd. But now Americans could enjoy the exotic taste of canned Hawaiian pineapple in all its sweet, tangy, tropical glory within just a few days of harvest. (In the ensuing years, Dole expanded his empire, eventually becoming the steward of more than 75% of the world’s pineapple crop.) Mr. Dole’s contributions were monumental advancements for the American food industry. The introduction of canning fresh pineapple in a sugar-water syrup gave the home cook a delicious new product at low cost that would result in the birth of the Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Dole was also an early adopter of the new art of advertising canned food products to America. Hand-painted billboards, colored posters in shop windows, and magazine and newspaper ads were just a few of the forms of advertising used to promote the wondrous flavors of Dole pineapple. Yet Dole needed something more -- something big -- to advertise the virtues of his canned pineapple to American home cooks. He would find that big break in a recipe contest. In 1925, Dole ran a national advertising campaign, offering up prizes of $50 for each of the 100 recipes that would be selected for the cookbook featuring dishes using his pineapple products. The contest was a rousing success, garnering upwards of 60,000 entries -- including somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 recipes for Pineapple Upside-Down Cakes. One of those found its way into Dole’s cookbook – and the overwhelming number of Upside-Down Cake entries in the contest tells one that cooks had been baking the cake at home far earlier than 1925. Prior to 1925, home cooks might have used fresh pineapple (a rarity in those days) in their cakes, or maybe they used homemade canned pineapple (also rare); most likely, Dole’s product was a convenient replacement for a variety of other fresh or preserved fruits. But it was Dole’s ad campaign that garnered national publicity for his new packaging, and formalized the name for this delicious new cake. Dole’s gift to America’s kitchens would go on to inspire thousands of new recipes using pineapple.

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While Mr. Dole was harvesting and canning pineapples in the Hawaiian Islands, some 2,500 miles to the North, in the small college town of Corvallis, Oregon, Ernest H. Wiegand, Professor of Horticulture at Oregon State College (today Oregon State University), was developing modern technology for brining and processing maraschino cherries on a large scale for distribution in America, obviating the need for importation of a European luxury. Into the late 1890’s, the Italian Marasca cherry was served in fancy cocktails at exclusive hotel bars, and was known primarily to upper class Americans and the royal families of Europe. Marascas were beyond the means of most Americans since they were imported; preservation in liqueur added even more to the cost. Since the turn of the century, American cherry producers had been experimenting with cost-effective methods of preserving cherries, substituting American grown Queen Anne and Royal Anne cherries for the more expensive Marascara varietals. They tinkered with different flavoring agents like almond extract as a substitution for the liqueur and began adding red dyes to give the cherries a more attractive appearance. When Prohibition came in 1920, importation of Marascas stopped, yet America had developed an appetite for little red gems in their highballs and shots of bathtub gin. Some camps will argue that Professor Wiegand was looking for ways to get rid of excess cherries that weren’t good enough for canned pie cherry production or for fresh eating cherries. Others say he was trying to develop a cherry due to the limits of Prohibition. However, the studious Professor was simply experimenting. He wasn’t trying to make political statements or setting out to make a profit. Ever the typical tinkering Oregonian when it came to agricultural improvements, Wiegand was attempting to develop a brining process that could operate on a large scale and would result in a sweet cherry with a crisp crunch and bright red appearance. Sound scientific research and development in his Corvallis campus laboratory during the 20’s led Wiegand to a modern method for processing maraschinos, a replacement for the soft fruits that were were being marketed in lieu of the Italian original. Wiegand’s cherries – with stem attached so they had the appearance of ripe red cherries just off the tree -- would change the candied cherry industry in America. Professor Wiegand’s maraschino cherry technology was introduced in 1925, the same year that Mr. Dole’s recipe contest blazed through America’s kitchens. Today the production process hasn’t changed much from the formulas Professor Wiegand developed more than 80 years ago; today, Wiegand Hall on the campus at Oregon State serves students studying food technology and horticulture.

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The cake that won the 1925 contest was not garnished with maraschino cherries. They were most likely added to the recipe in 1926 or 1927 when the “new” style of maraschino cherries were first bottled and found their way to market shelves. Professor’s Wiegand’s cherries quickly became the signature garnish for Mr. Dole’s cake. These two unlikely partners — the businessman from Hawaii and the Professor from Corvallis — changed food technology and food production in America and, by a simple twist of fate, perfected an American classic, the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. In the years since Dole’s 1925 recipe contest, cooks have concocted all manner of variations of the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, including such dreadful sounding dishes as the “Orleans Fruit Cake” -- a 1957 entrant in the 9th Grand National Pillsbury Bake-Off. The Orleans Cake is loosely based on the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake -- fruit placed in the bottom of a pan and a sponge-cake batter poured on top. But that’s the only distant relationship between the two. The Orleans cake replaces pineapple with pecans and watermelon-rind pickles. Watermelon-rind pickles, a delicious accompaniment to a tuna-salad sandwich, have no business in a Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. Cooks have also tampered with the proven taste foundations of the Pineapple Upside Down Cake by adapting the technique for savory dishes -- all efforts resulting in questionable results. In a recipe for “Pineapple Upside-Down Ham Loaf,” (in the 1942 edition of The Good Housekeeping Cookbook), the cook is instructed to mix combine dry mustard, vinegar and sugar and sprinkle this mixture in the bottom of a baking dish. Canned pineapple slices are placed on the dry sugar mix, and on top of that, a layer of ground cooked ham, pork shoulder, eggs, milk and cracker crumbs -- a sort of Hawaiian meat loaf if you will. This is an affront to the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. (Personally, I’ve never understood the affection for the pairing of ham and pineapple, in cakes or on pizza, and calling it “Hawaiian.”). To the uninitiated, a Pineapple Upside-Down Cake appears to be an unwieldy concoction that is difficult to re-create, but from a technical standpoint, the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake is actually quite easy to make. The list of ingredients is typically no more than 10 or 12, all of which can be purchased at any supermarket. Still, the guises in which cooks cloak the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake are endless. In a rush to create the latest trendy derivative of this famous cake, we are subjected to such concoctions as the Daffodil Upside-Down Cake, the Fuzzy Navel Upside-Down Cake, (apparently a blend of peaches and liquor), Pineapple Upside-Down Mini Bundt Cakes and a regional favorite of the upper-Midwest, the Pineapple Upside-Down Wisconsin Gouda Cake. Fresh cherries -- even the original, noble Marasca -- are a poor substitute for Wiegand’s maraschinos, when used to stud the rings of pineapple in an upside-down cake. They leak juice when baked, watering down the sticky caramel syrup that binds the pineapple to the cake. Fresh cherries don’t have the snappy crunch or that sweet taste of the maraschino. No, only maraschino cherries will do for your Pineapple Upside-Down Cake -- and they must be red -- not green or one of the new-age fluorescent colors of maraschino cherries that are becoming popular in markets today. Day-glo blue cherries were definitely not a part of our food culture in 1925, nor should they be today when you make your special cake.

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A few weeks after the Hazelnut Cake disappointment, I wrote my friend to tell him I was writing about Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, wondering if he had any special memories of Pineapple Upside-Down Cake when he was growing up in 1950s Philadelphia. To my surprise, I learned that his Mother had never baked him one. “Why,” she asked, “Would I make you a cake upside-down when I can make you one right-side-up?” Ida Richman was only being practical -- why would any sane homemaker go to the trouble of baking a cake upside-down? What if upside-down cakes required special pans, ovens or mystical techniques? And I suppose we fear that which we have not baked -- and let’s not parse the argument that all cakes are baked “upside-down” and then turned out, before being slathered in frosting. We needn’t pity her son. A childhood bereft of this iconic dessert did not scar the dear boy for life. Still, I hope that the next time I have dinner with Ida’s son Alan, dessert will be a nice slice of Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

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David Ross lives in Spokane, but works a one-hour plane ride away. When he's not tending to his day job -- or commuting -- he writes about food, reviews restaurants and does food presentation. He is on the eGullet Society hosting team. Photos by the author.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s like admitting that you like fondue or iceberg lettuce; that your favorite dinner is pot roast made with Lipton Onion Soup mix.

It wasn’t always like that. When I turned 21, the Gimlet was considered daring in my crowd, a step up from the Rum-and-Cokes and blended Mai Tais my friends preferred. If it had lost some of the cachet that inspired Raymond Chandler to make it Philip Marlowe’s drink of choice in The Long Goodbye, it remained a sophisticated option for a college girl. These days? Sure, you can still get one -- even in “serious” cocktail lounges that wouldn’t be caught dead with it on the official menu -- but it’s now served with a hint of condescension alongside the lime wheel.

Scores of old-school drinks have been rediscovered in the current cocktail renaissance. Martinis, Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and Sidecars have been rescued from the obscurity that shrouded them during the last quarter of the twentieth century and regained their stature as bar classics. Even the long-beleaguered Tiki drinks have been rehabilitated. The Gimlet might be unique in failing to make a comeback. Why all those cocktails and not my favorite? What is it about the Gimlet that keeps it from taking its rightful place beside those other stalwarts of the bar?

One word: Rose’s. From the “half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else” of Chandler’s Terry Lennox to a more modern two-to-one or even four-to-one mixture, Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice is the sine qua non of the drink: it’s what makes a Gimlet a Gimlet. So, you may ask, what’s wrong with Rose’s?

In a sense, Rose’s has suffered not for what it is, but for what it is not. Rose’s Lime Juice (Lime Cordial in the UK and Canada) is exactly what it sounds like -- a sweetened lime juice -- and therein lies the problem. Sugar and preservatives give Rose’s a shelf life several orders of magnitude longer than fresh lime juice, making it attractive to bar owners who pay more attention to their accountants than their taste buds, and to bartenders who find it easier to pour from a bottle than to squeeze fresh citrus. Thus in the dark ages of cocktail culture, Rose’s came to be regarded as a substitute for fresh lime and found its way (along with the ubiquitous sour mix) into all sorts of drinks where it did not belong. But when used as a substitute in a drink that’s designed to be made with fresh lime juice, Rose’s throws off the balance, fails to provide the acidity of just-squeezed, and turns a bracing, tart tipple into a sweet, cloying travesty. It didn’t help that competitors came out with cheaper knock-offs that contained little if any actual lime juice, and those same penurious bar owners often substituted imposters for the real thing. Thus, Rose’s gained a reputation for being artificial and inferior.

This abuse of Rose’s and its imitators maimed if not killed cocktails like the Daiquiri and the Margarita, which demand fresh lime juice. As the new generation of enthusiasts rediscovered classic drinks made with classic ingredients, fresh lime juice reclaimed its rightful place in these and other libations. It’s not surprising that some of these apostles went overboard and insisted on replacing Rose’s in the Gimlet as well. But a drink made with gin, fresh lime juice and sugar or simple syrup is not a Gimlet; it might be tasty, but it’s spiritually akin to a Daiquiri. A Gimlet requires the funkiness, the bitter undertones, of lime cordial -- not the brightness of fresh juice.

Those who would take Rose’s out of the Gimlet, those who condemn it because it’s not fresh lime juice, are misguided. They don’t blame grenadine for not being fresh pomegranate juice; why then expect lime cordial to be fresh lime juice?

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Anyone with an internet connection and a search engine can, with a few keystrokes, find a thumbnail history of Rose’s Lime Cordial from one of what seems like hundreds of “official” Rose’s web sites. (The reason for the multitude of sites is that virtually every country seems to have a different distributor; in the US, for instance, Rose’s has been sold more often than a 37-year-old outfielder. It’s now owned by Snapple.) This one is typical: “In 1867, Scottish businessman Lauchlan Rose had been in the juice business for two years. That same year, two things happened: Rose patented his process of preserving lime juice without using rum and the 1867 Merchant Shipping Act was passed. Although the sailors grumbled a little about losing their rum, it wasn’t long before sweetened juice from Rose’s West Indian limes was a shipboard staple.”

Nice little story, but factual? Hardly. While it’s true that in 1867 Lauchlan Rose patented a process of preserving lime juice, and that a Merchant Shipping Act was passed, the rest of it is fanciful fabrication.

First of all, The Merchant Shipping Acts had nothing to do with the British Royal Navy. In nineteenth century Britain there were, essentially, two maritime operations: the Royal Navy, which protected the realm, and the merchant navy, which was commercial in nature. The Royal Navy began providing its sailors with lemon or lime juice (to prevent scurvy on long voyages) much earlier and more consistently than the merchant ships; the merchant ships, after all, were about profit, and antiscorbutic measures were expensive.

Furthermore, the 1867 Merchant Shipping Act was not the first of the acts, nor the last; more important, it wasn’t the first to stipulate that citrus juice had to be provided for merchant marines. What it did, among other things, was to lay out in precise terms how the lime juice was to be treated and stored before it was loaded on board. Among other criteria, “no Lime or Lemon Juice shall be so obtained or delivered from any Warehouse as aforesaid unless . . . the same contains Fifteen per Centum of proper and palatable Proof Spirits.” “Proper and palatable proof spirits” equaled brandy, or more often, rum. When Lauchlan Rose looked for a way to preserve lime juice without alcohol, his motive was not to conform to the Shipping Act. Nor was it to keep sailors sober -- in the Royal Navy, at least, sailors received a daily allotment of rum, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century.

The true story behind Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial (its original name) is more like this:

Lauchlan Rose was one of several merchants who sold lime juice -- in bulk, laced with rum -- to ships. He wasn’t the only or even the first businessman with the idea of marketing sweetened lime juice to the general population, but he was certainly the first to figure out how to preserve lime juice without alcohol (actually, to preserve it, period. The amount of alcohol in the goods destined for the ships was probably not very effective). So if his motivation wasn’t naval stores, why pursue that avenue? With the temperance movement in full swing by the late nineteenth century, it’s much more likely that he wanted a drink he could market as a healthy option for land dwellers.

The next patents he received bear this theory out. All nine of them had to do with bottling and stoppers, which indicates an eye to the popular market, not to ships and sailors at all, since juice destined for sea was supplied in safer and more economical barrels, not fragile glass. His bottles, embossed with a motif of lime leaves and blossoms, soon came to dominate the new “soft drink” market, helped by advertisements lauding the healthful properties of his cordial. Over time, the sweetened lime juice sold by L. Rose & Co. outlived all its competitors, and by the first years of the twentieth century, it was being imported into the United States.

The proposed histories of the Gimlet are even less plausible than those of Rose’s Lime Juice. This is not surprising, since they rely on the putative histories of Lauchlan and his beverage, which we’ve already seen are suspect.

This condensed version of the history of the Gimlet from the web site That’s The Spirit! is the poster child for inaccuracy: “In 1867, the Merchant Shipping Act declared that, in an effort to prevent the dreaded scurvy, all ships of the British Royal Navy had to carry stores of lime juice. Sailors, to make the lime more palatable, added gin and named the mixture after the corkscrew-like device used to open the barrels of juice. In the official Royal Navy story, it was T.O. Gimlette, a naval surgeon who came aboard in 1879, who created the concoction to encourage shipmates to take the lime rations.”

Web sites are not alone in propagating this falsehood, as this mention from the San Francisco Chronicle proves: “Fans of the cocktail will be relieved to learn that the gimlet was originally the health drink of the British Royal Navy. To stave off scurvy, the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 required ships to carry lime juice and ration it to sailors. The same year this law was passed, Lauchlin [sic] Rose patented a method of preserving lime juice without the addition of alcohol . . . Lime juice isn't terribly tasty on its own, so crafty sailors made it more palatable with the addition of gin. The cocktail name originated from the tool called a gimlet that was used to open the casks of lime juice, or from a ship's surgeon named Sir Thomas Desmond Gimlette, depending on which story you believe.”

You shouldn’t believe either. This sort of speculation isn’t unique to the Gimlet, of course. Stories abound about the origin of all kinds of cocktails and cocktail names, from the Martini to the Margarita, and logic dictates that most if not all of them are false.

But I don’t care so much about those other drinks; I care about the Gimlet. Fanciful stories about lime-toting doctors or corkscrews notwithstanding, it seems certain that the Gimlet didn’t originate with sailors on board merchant or Royal ships -- which is not to say it didn’t have a link to the navies. My guess is that it was invented by the officers of those ships. As Dave Wondrich (member name Splificator), cocktail historian extraordinaire, points out, the earliest British written version of the drink calls for Plymouth gin. “The Navy had a huge base in Plymouth, and Plymouth Gin had a long history of popularity among its officers,” who drank gin, in part, to reinforce the class distinction between them and their rum-swilling men. It doesn’t seem farfetched that they might also have traveled with a store of Rose’s Lime Cordial, the popular new health drink and probably yet another mark of luxury that set them apart from the rank-and-file. Also, as he points out, in the earliest version of the drink, ice is optional. Without access to that frozen commodity, maritime officers would have made their drinks ice-free.

Picture a clutch of officers relaxing in the captain’s quarters, or more likely, at the Officer’s Club in the exotic country where their ship is docked. The first mate pulls out a bottle of light green juice in an embossed glass bottle.

“What’s that, then?” a fellow officer asks.

“It’s a new drink they’ve been selling in the fancy markets. Supposed to be good for you,” he answers. “My mother-in-law gave it to me. Says I should drink it instead of gin,” he adds, with a roll of his eyes.

When the men’s laughter subsides, the captain lifts up the bottle. “You mind?” he asks the mate, and opens it to take a sip. “Not bad,” he says. “But it would be better with gin.”

Another round of laughter, and then with a thoughtful look, the mate retrieves the bottle. He nods to the bartender. “Could we get a round of gins here, Thomas?” Pouring the contents of the bottle among the glasses, he says, “May as well make my mother-in-law happy, eh?”

The officers sip, then gulp, then call for a bottle of gin and pour another round. “I like it,” says the mate. “It’s sharp. Bores right into your head. Just like a gimlet.”

“Or the way your mother-in-law looks at you,” jokes the captain.

The mate laughs. “Here’s to the Gimlet. And to my wife’s mum’s gimlet-eyed stare.”

Whether it’s the refreshing nature of the sweet and sour drink, or just the novelty of it, the Gimlet becomes the “it” drink in officers’ clubs throughout the Empire and eventually makes its way back to England, and then across the Atlantic.

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Cocktail enthusiasts are no strangers to making their own ingredients when the commercial versions are either unavailable or of dubious quality. Professional bartenders and dedicated amateurs alike make their own grenadine and orgeat, falernum and bitters. It’s not surprising, then, that recipes are cropping up for lime syrup or cordial.

The nature of these formulations depends on the motivation of those who make them. The easiest recipes simply infuse sugar syrup -- cooked or not -- with lime zest. It’s a favorite of people who truly dislike Rose’s. This is not a bad syrup, but it lacks complexity -- the bitter edge and dark tropical must of Rose’s. Since it contains no lime juice or other acid, it must be balanced with lots of lime juice. By the time you add enough juice to balance the sweetness, you may as well be drinking limeade with gin – not a bad drink, but not a Gimlet.

Other recipes call for citric and tartaric acid along with lime juice and zest to balance the sugar. The ingredients are simmered, then steeped and strained. These recipes are often put forward by and for those who want to avoid the high fructose corn syrup in American Rose’s. The implication behind these recipes seems to be that HFCS has ruined Rose’s and that a cordial made with sugar will be closer to the original Rose’s. (Interestingly, the British Rose’s Lime Cordial, which is still made with sugar, tastes one-dimensional and flat when compared with its American cousin.) Whether these resemble the original Rose’s is something we’ll never know, but it’s curious that these recipes call for citric and tartaric acid, since neither the American nor the British versions contain tartaric acid, and only the British version contains citric acid, a sour cheat probably employed to save money on the cordial’s most expensive -- and eponymous -- ingredient.

Me? I never had any desire to try my hand at making lime cordial. I like Rose’s; it’s been a steadfast occupant of my refrigerator since I had my first apartment. I drink it not only in Gimlets but with seltzer and ice in the summer. I’ve defended it against those who vilify it. I was not ashamed of my love affair with the Gimlet. I never wanted to find a replacement for Rose’s. But one day, a replacement found me.

I was at Tales of the Cocktail attending a seminar on gin (yes, I know -- way cool, and tax deductible, too). Francesco Lafranconi concocted his version of lime cordial, which he then used to build the most spectacular Gimlet I’d ever tasted. He added makrut (kaffir) limes and leaves to the typical Persian lime juice; a pinch of mango powder and salt added layers of complexity. A couple ounces of gin elicited more flavor from the ingredients as they cooked. What ended up in our glasses was almost enough to make me forget Rose’s.

My course was clear: to recreate that syrup. It took me longer than I’d expected. I had the ingredients written down, but no amounts. By the time I found a source of kaffir limes and leaves, I was a bit hazy on the details. But after a few tries (and multiple, bank-breaking shipments of kaffir limes from across the country), I had something. It wasn’t Rose’s Lime Cordial (for which I still have a huge soft spot). But I bet those guys in the Officers’ Club would have liked it anyway.

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Lime cordial

If you can find fresh kaffir limes, just cut one in half, squeeze in the juice and add both spent halves. If you can’t, a few pieces of dried rind will work. And if you can’t find the rind, the syrup is still good with just the leaves. You should be able to find amchoor in the Indian section of an international market in the spice section.

1 cup granulated white sugar

1/4 cup demerara sugar

2 ounces gin

3/4 cup water

5 kaffir lime leaves

Rind of one kaffir lime (dried or fresh)

Zest of one Persian lime

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon dried mango powder (amchoor)

5 ounces of lime juice, divided

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, dissolve the sugars in the gin and water. Add the leaves, rind, zest, salt, amchoor, and 2 ounces of the lime juice and bring to a simmer. Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes and then remove from the heat. Add the remaining 3 ounces of lime juice and let cool. Strain through a very fine strainer or cheesecloth. Keep refrigerated; this will last at least a month.

Any Other Name (JAZ’s Gimlet)

2 ounces dry London gin

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1/2 ounce lime cordial (above)

Place in a shaker with lots of ice and shake hard. Strain out into a chilled cocktail glass. If you close your eyes, you may be transported to a dark, seedy LA bar, raising a glass with Philip Marlowe. Skip the ice, and you might find yourself sharing a round at some far-flung outpost of the British Empire.

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Janet A. Zimmerman (aka JAZ) is a food writer and culinary instructor based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is an eGullet Society manager.

I replied to my friend’s email: "It’s pronounced with a soft a, as in Patsy. Pasties. I don’t have to drive to Escanaba to buy the twirly sparkly things -- I’ve got a drawerful of them."

The pasty is a true regional specialty, as synonymous with the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as moutarde is in Dijon. It belongs to the baking class of "hand pies," an unappetizing handle that conjures Sweeney Todd, rather than those pasty relatives the empanadas, samosas, saitis and peach turnovers. Like these other handy little pies a pasty is poor folks’ food: hot, filling and amenable to variation.

The Yooper pasty is a direct descendent of the Cornish pasty and comes by its ancestry from the right side of the blanket. In the nineteen century Cornishmen (nicknamed Cousin Jacks) left their cold Celtic tin mines to work in the colder copper mines clustered around the Keweenaw Peninsula of Lake Superior. They brought with them their miner’s lunch: the pasty -- a D-shaped lunch delivery system perfect for the dirt and sweat of the pits. Don’t even consider rolling out your soft and flaky pastry for this recipe: the crust developed in Cornwall was tough enough to drop down a mine shaft without cracking open. In fact, in the Cornish tin mines before the advent of aluminum foil or Monty Python lunchboxes, the miner wouldn’t eat the pastry because it was so dirty -- he ate the filling, peeling off the pastry like the toughest of banana skins. The crust was tossed into the depths to satiate the Knockers -- malevolent spirits who lurked in the shadows and pulled down pilings unless they received their tough dirty dough.

When the copper mines closed, the Cornish left the Upper Peninsula, taking their pasties with them as they migrated through Montana, Wyoming and Arizona to pick up a pick where there was a lode to be mined. Jamie Oliver’s new "America" book includes a recipe from a woman who makes pasties for cowboys. They aren’t Cornish -- or even Yooper -- filled as they are with chicken and squash. They’re mere hand pies.

You think I’m strict? Not as strict as the folks at the Cornish Pasty Association. They’re seeking the equivalent of an Appellation Contrôllée; here are their tough but fair guidelines:

A genuine Cornish pasty has a distinctive ‘D’ shape and is crimped on one side, never on top. The texture of the filling is chunky, made up of uncooked minced or roughly cut chunks of beef (not less than 12.5%), swede or turnip, potato and onion and a light peppery seasoning. The pastry casing is golden in colour, savoury, glazed with milk or egg and robust enough to retain its shape throughout the cooking and cooling process without splitting or cracking. The whole pasty is slow-baked and no flavourings or additives must be used. It must also be made in Cornwall.

I flunk Cornwall, but I’m down with their dictates. The classic Michigan pasty is very, very close, though Yoopers sometimes branch out into flights of ground pork. The Cornish thing gets blurred, because after the copper mines closed in the Upper Peninsula, a huge immigration of Finns adapted to the local cuisine and call the pasty their own. I checked out the menu at the award-winning Dobber's Pasties in Escanaba, (back my day, The Red Onion) and they’re pandering to the Lite and Veggie world with chicken and vegetarian versions. They’re probably pretty good, but a snob like me calls them turnovers.

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Pasty Pastry -- the Tough Part

The classic filling requires more or less equal parts of onion, potatoes, turnips or rutabagas (I like the bright orange color and slightly sweeter flavor of the rootytootoots -- their nom de cuisine chez moi,) and beef, all cut into quarter-inch dice. A word about the meat: the pasty is the perfect vehicle for boring lean cuts like round steak -- the small size of the pieces and the steamy interior of the pasty works beautifully to tenderize it. Season with salt and pepper. Done. Restrain your hands from pinching off a little fresh thyme or summer savory, at least at the first time of baking. If you later succumb to a misguided desire for pumped-up flavor, know that purists like me, The Cornish Pasty Association and pasty stand owners from Manistique to Houghton will sneer. Just sayin’.

The drama is in the pastry; I had to unlearn everything I know about the flaky, the tender, the buttery. I tried a vegetable shortening boiling water pastry (good flavor, too crumbly) a half-butter half-shortening pâte brisée (too rich) and a straightforward 1950s shortening piecrust (too flaky, too soft.) I didn’t want toughness that could dive down a mineshaft; nevertheless, sturdiness was in order. Nor had I been impressed with the dough produced by the Michigan pasty patisseries -- it was serviceable and sturdy: a container for the thing contained. It wouldn’t survive a fall of six feet, but I didn’t feel guilty about rejecting the thick crimped edges as tough and tasteless.

I checked the pantry and discovered that I had just enough flour to dust one onion ring. I grabbed my cars keys and made the further unwelcome discovery that my car wouldn’t start -- what is it with that battery? It was a glorious early November day, the jack-o’-lanterns provided a suburban gallery crawl and what the heck’s a ten minute walk? A ten-minute walk was long enough for me to ponder pastry and self-administer a head smack. D’oh! I’d reduce the classic fat/flour pastry ratio from 1:3 to 1:4 for a less short dough. A tub of manteca from the local supermercado lurked somewhere behind last week’s leftovers in the fridge, and I knew I’d find some Crisco behind the family- sized jar of neon green Chicago pickle relish. It felt good to have a plan: the 1:4 fat-to-flour ratio, and cheap mixed fat at that.

My deductive reasoning skills mostly fail me, except in cooking problems (or speculation of my friends’ love lives). Reader, I got it right: the pastry was sturdy, not tough, and that porky presence from the manteca added an elusive meaty flavor. I tried the proportions again using straight shortening, and it was darn near as good. This is the time to use an old-fashioned pastry blender, two knives or your fingertips to blend the cold fat into the flour; one pulse too many in the food processor could overmix the shortening.

I don’t fuss with side dishes on Pasty Night, because a pasty is a balanced meal, almost Pollanesque in its scanty meat to lavish (delicious nutritious) vegetables. If you crave more vegetables, remember that the only condiment permitted with pasties (put that jar of homemade chowchow down!) is ketchup.

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Michigan Pasties

Makes six nine-inch pies

This is adapted from the recipe in American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland, one of the books in the peerless, out-of-print Time-Life series "Foods of the World."

Pastry

4 c. all-purpose flour

1 c. cold vegetable shortening

2 t. salt

10-12 T. very cold water

1 egg

With pastry blender or fingertips, work the shortening, lightning-fast, into the flour until it looks like "flakes of coarse meal." Mix in 10 tablespoons of water, toss the ingredients together, and try to gather up into a ball. If it’s too crumbly, add another 2 tablespoons of water and re-form the ball. Wrap in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.

Set the oven to 400˚F.

Filling:

5 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into ¼ cubes. (About 1-½ pounds)

1 smallish rutabaga, peeled and cut into ¼ inch dice (About 1-½ cups)

2 lbs top round (or similar cut) in ¼ inch dice

1-½ cups chopped onion (you can guess the size by now)

1 T. salt

1 t. fresh ground black pepper

Mix everything together in a big bowl.

Assembly:

Beat the egg lightly for an egg wash. Divide the dough into 6 approximately equal pieces. Find a plate or pot cover 9 inches across. Between floured pieces of plastic wrap, roll out each piece of dough until it’s large enough so that, using the plate as a template, (remove the top layer of plastic wrap!) you can cut out a neat circle. Repeat five times.

Place about 1-½ cups of filling down the center of the pastry, leaving a half-inch hem at the circumference. Fold in half, then crimp the edges together, firmly. Place the pasties on cookie sheets and slash a small slit on the top of each. Brush on the egg wash. Bake for 45 minutes, or until golden brown.

If you have leftovers, wrap them in foil and refrigerate. They reheat beautifully in the oven.

When I skidded into my late thirties, I went through a predictable, even clichéd series of life upheavals that revealed, among many other things, that I was drinking way too much. Starting around 5:00 pm every day, I’d enter a state of intense anticipation, awaiting the cool bite of scotch or the warm wash of red wine. It didn’t matter whether I was at a business dinner in an increasingly unpleasant, anxious job or at home in an increasingly unpleasant, anxious marriage. I always had at least two drinks -- usually three or four -- work days and weekends.

Over the span of several tumultuous months, I changed many things in my life for the better -- work, marriage, home -- and my drinking changed, too. I didn't drink at all through the first months of this transition, and when I started again, I drank less frequently. After sustaining this change for a couple of years, I got a phone call from a researcher who wanted me to participate in a six-month study about alcohol consumption. I agreed right away. You see, my reform was wholly my own; I hadn't needed a helping hand from any twelve-step programs, therapists, or medications. If science wanted me to help needy others by modeling my superior awareness and control, I’d provide that service, humbly, to humankind.

As part of the study, I started recording my drinking, and over the course of the first couple of months I noticed a pattern. Occasionally I had nothing to drink. Occasionally I had two drinks. But on all other nights, week in and week out, I had exactly one drink, whether at home or at a restaurant, stressed out or happy, in town or on the road. By the time the survey wrapped up, I didn't worry about keeping my records up-to-date; I'd just try to remember those exceptional drink-free or multi-drink days at the end of each two- or three-week period, mark them down, and fill in the rest of the calendar with ones.

I was smug about those numbers. I‘d reduced my daily drinking from two, three, even four drinks down to a single drink most nights, and I had the scientific data to prove it. That single evening drink was not only evidence that I was drinking less, it was evidence that I was drinking a healthy amount, like, you know, the French. One evening drink was the 21st century version of an apple a day, right?

When the study wrapped up, my hubris made the beginning of my exit interview pretty fun, as I rattled off my last few weeks of ones. But the hubris didn't last long; science wanted a final datum, not of counted number but of measured amount.

"When you have a drink at home," the researcher asked, "how many ounces of alcohol do you usually drink?"

"Oh, you know, a regular serving," I sputtered.

"So, when you have a bourbon, say, your glass has about two or three ounces of liquor in it."

She asked her final questions, thanked me, and hung up. But I was pretty sure I’d just sold science, and my pride, down the river.

For a while I pretended that her question hadn’t bothered me, but it kept nagging, particularly when I pulled down one of the glasses I used for drinks at home. Months after the survey had ended, I took one of those glasses out of the cupboard to split an Anchor Steam with my wife. I nearly filled my own glass and handed the bottle to her.

"Not exactly half," she said, tilting the bottle and finishing it off.

She was right: there had been no more than an inch of beer left in her bottle. I’d stiffed her because I assumed my drinking glass held six, maybe eight ounces max. Surprise: it held exactly twelve ounces of liquid. I was now shaken and stirred. A few days later, when no one was around, I grabbed a glass from the cabinet, placed four ice cubes into it, poured in my usual amount of bourbon, and then strained the bourbon into a measuring cup. This one drink -- bourbon on the rocks, the one I enjoyed most consistently -- consisted of more than three two-ounce drinks.

It was little consolation to realize that I was, by any measure, drinking far less than I had been back when I regularly knocked back three or four of these bombs. But I knew I’d been deluding myself about my drinking, and I invested a lot in my seeming self-awareness. I stood at the sink, looking at the glass full of bourbon and ice, more deluded than I’d been moments before.

Turns out that, most nights, I had a three-drink minimum.

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My maternal grandfather was one of those Mainers that you read about -- a great accent, rough hands, wry humor, and a prodigious belly on a wiry frame. Grampa bounced around in different jobs from the Depression through the 1970s, baker to farmhand, bus driver to janitor. Though I never became close to him, I’ve got vivid, important memories dating back decades. I remember sharing a Fanta orange soda in a glass bottle with him after a hot afternoon of work in his beloved garden, where he wrung tomatoes, peas, and rhubarb out of the Maine clay. I remember standing next to him at a table covered with old newpapers, bowls, and cups of melted butter, greedily consuming the clam necks that his dentures, which had bitten off the tender steamer bellies, hadn't allowed him to chew.

And I remember his daily ritual. When he arrived home from work at the school he cleaned, he'd putter furtively by the kitchen sink and the surrounding cabinets. My brother and I spent many weeks at their house near Waterville each year, particularly during the summers, and I grew familiar with the strange rhythms of my grandparents’ life. I never quite understood many of those rhythms; tip-lipped Yankees both, they had little interest in self-reflection and offered few insights to kids. But even when I was young, I sensed that his habit of heading straight for the kitchen sink held odd, perhaps troubling, meanings.

I was eight when grampa first asked me, soon after getting home, if I was ready for a bit of hooch. Gramma, a teetotaler, overheard this, and scolded him, completing an exchange I found baffling. So, the next afternoon, I rushed to my grampa's car the moment he arrived, and asked, "What's hooch?"

He grinned and walked me from the driveway through the back door into the kitchen, glancing around to confirm that gramma was in a back room. He reached up to the cabinets above the sink, extending his hand to the back of the top shelf, and brought down a small glass. It was clear and thick, with an indented bottom, encircled by a thin white line just below the rim.

He reached under the sink and pulled out a large, unfamiliar bottle. Showing me the turkey on the label, he said, "This is hooch," and he poured a splash of liquor into the glass. He handed the glass to me without speaking, letting me decide what to do; I didn't taste it, but just stuck my nose into the glass. And, all at once, I figured out what hooch was: hooch was what my grampa smelled like every night of his life.

He took back the glass, filled it, and drank, slowly enough to savor it but quickly enough to wrap things up before gramma popped in for a look-see. He rinsed out the glass, wiped it with a dish rag, and placed it back in its place on the top shelf, out of sight.

As I grew older, the familial tensions I’d sensed when I first heard the word "hooch" recurred with greater urgency. Now and then, I'd hear my grandmother say something to him under her breath. He'd snap at her to mind her own goddamned business. On the car ride back down to Massachusetts, my parents would whisper when they thought my brother and I had fallen asleep, asking each about his threats to "lie down on the train tracks and be done with it." In the year or two before lung cancer destroyed him, there had been family discussions about alcoholism. By then I was old enough to know what that meant.

But on summer nights when my gramma was reading in her bedroom and my brother and I watched the Red Sox at my grampa's feet, hooch was just a wisp in the warm air that floated through the living room screens. And sometimes, during a Schaefer commercial between innings, my grampa would go around the corner into the kitchen, squeak open cabinet doors, twist on and off a bottle cap and then the spigot, squeak open the cabinet doors again, and settle back into his easy chair, having turned one drink into two -- or maybe three -- with no one the wiser.

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For a few weeks after discovering that I’d been knocking back double scotches or triple bourbons most nights, I decided to go cold turkey once again. Lacking the zeal that had filled my veins during my divorce, I failed miserably. Though I knew I didn't crave the alcohol-based depressants, I wasn't sure what, if anything, I did crave.

To figure it out, I started wondering about my relationships to other quasi-addictions. I had been one of those smokers that real smokers hate, lighting up only when I would enjoy it entirely and able to go without a smoke for days, even weeks, at a time. The nicotine did little for me. However, tapping the cigarette on table or thumbnail, deciding how I'd hold this particular smoke, exhaling through the nose, mouth, or both: that stuff I loved.

I still missed the rituals of smoking, so I decided that I missed the rituals that surround drinking. I needed the most obsessive mode of drinking I could find, one that would provide me the satisfaction of alcohol, while cutting back on the amount. Since beer holds no romance for me, and serious wine consumption breaks my bank, I turned to the playland of vintage cocktails.

I started stocking up on all of the requisite fetish objects and elixirs with fervor. Soon, I’d accumulated a Hawthorne strainer and barspoon to accompany my fine Boston shaker, several obscure mail-order bitters and hard-to-find liqueurs, and a set of genuine 1950s cocktail glasses wrapped in tissue paper that I’d discovered, unloved, at a local yard sale, four for three bucks. Those glasses were the turning point, for they held just the right amount for a single, stunning drink.

I find deep pleasure in drinking a single, stunning drink most nights. Though my knowledge is slight and new, it’s well-rounded, thanks to a number of sources, primary among them Gary Regan's Joy of Mixology. Regan's book provides many deep, persnickety truths, just the sort with which a novice can legitimate his own prejudices and peccadilloes. With a few weeks of practice, I developed a solid, if rudimentary, ritual.

First, I ponder what's on hand: Do I have Tanqueray, Plymouth, or both? Did I use all of the lemons? How much of that homemade grenadine is on the refrigerator door? Then I search for a recipe that corresponds to both supply and desire.

With recipe in hand, I choose the right glass for the occasion and chill it. I select the necessary tools and lay out the bottles I'll need: my liquid mise en place. I measure (I always measure) a half-ounce of this and two ounces of that, pouring each in sequence into my shaker. Even if they aren't in the recipe, I squirt in a dash of bitters -- two, if the recipe asks for one.

I stir, counting to forty, or I shake, counting to twenty. Each count is one-half second; I've timed it. I strain. And, only then -- after I've performed a meticulous, pleasurable ritual that may not rival a Japanese tea ceremony in complexity of meaning but does in anticipation -- do I drink.

Following that engaging, satisfying, and obsessive process, I find I want to have only one drink almost every night -- but what a drink it is. I spent a full week marveling at the perfection of the Pegu Club. I've had my world opened to the dry backbone that maraschino adds to gin and lemon in the Aviation Cocktail. I've come to understand why Gary Regan calls the Manhattan, a concoction I’d been throwing together for years with little thought, "the finest cocktail on the face of the earth."

Over the last few weeks, I've been intrigued by one particular vintage cocktail. While it’s a great drink, its recipe makes it legendary, a ritual so involved and contentious that debate about it continues to this day. After reading about it in Regan, on-line, and elsewhere, I decided that I had to try the glass-rinsing, sugar-muddling, rind-twisting procedure that makes the Sazerac the Kama Sutra for cocktail ritualists.

There are dozens of recipes for this famous drink, but for my first time out I decided to go with Regan's less intricate recipe. I had lemons and simple syrup on hand, and I've been fortunate to find a regular source so I can keep Peychaud's bitters in stock. In a moment of criminality that would make a New Orleanian cringe, I dug a bottle of Pernod from the back of my liquor cabinet as a substitute for the essential Herbsaint -- impossible to find in my hometown.

That left me with one item to find: a bottle of rye. I'd never had rye; didn't have a clue about it. Conversations with liquor store clerks didn't help much, as they hadn't ever seen a bottle of the stuff. After trudging all over town, at the eighth store I visited, I spotted a bottle of Old Overholt, lurking on the bottom shelf behind the register. I drove straight home and set to work.

I filled my cocktail glass with crushed ice and water to chill it. I measured out the rye and simple syrup into my shaker, and I splashed in several dashes of Peychaud's bitters. I trimmed off a thick curl of lemon rind with care, lest I spray the precious oil on my fingers instead of atop the drink's surface, and set it aside.

Working quickly, I dumped the ice and ice water from my glass, dried it, rinsed a capful of Pernod around the inside, and poured out the remainder. I added crushed ice to the shaker, stirred while counting to forty, and strained the drink into its anisette-lined glass. Finally, with pride, I twisted the lemon rind over the glass and dropped it in.

Even without the lovely, tortured ritual, the Sazerac is an elusive drink to describe, complex at some moments and simple at others. It starts quick and bright in your mouth, the lemon and anise sitting on top, and turns slow and dark as the rye releases and lingers.

That first Sazerac was unlike anything I've ever tasted, but I recognized it immediately. The lemon gave way to the rye, my tongue became my nose, and once again I inhaled the hooch on my grampa's breath.

I remember going to Woolworth's -- which sported its year-round but especially seasonal red-and-gold shop sign -- on the rue Des Forges in Trois-Rivieres, and casing the racks of Christmas cards. I had 50 cents, so I had to settle for robins and holly. The two-dollar assortment, so out of reach for a seven year-old on an allowance, gleamed and glittered and glammed. I wanted that box -- it showed the landscape from my bedroom window as I pressed my nose against its lacy ice-etched pane, waiting for Santa.

The sky was deepest midnight blue on those cards, plastered with foil stars, the snow a dusting drift of metallic sugar. Lights peeped from the windows of steep-roofed cottages. All was cold, all was bright.

There's no describing the cold of those Christmas Eves. I’ve lived in Chicago for 30 years, and, by comparison, I'm living in Palm Springs. When we were courting, my Chicagoan husband waited at a bus stop with me in Montreal in January and we wrapped ourselves around each other against the stunning cold. He breathed on my face to warm me up "like the animals did in the stable, breathing on the Baby" -- and Montreal was a sultry microclimate away from my home town.

Christmas Eve snow stood five-foot deep, glassy and hard as a Caspar David Friedrich sea. A child could walk on that polar continent until she crashed through the crust and felt the shards bite the exposed inch between boots and snow pants like the fangs of a white shark. It hurt, that crust. But as Christmas Eve turned to early Christmas Day, it shone gold from the bungalow lights of my neighbors (French Canadians returning from midnight mass to break fast at the reveillon). Just like the snow on the two-dollar box.

The reveillon is an early Christmas morning fete, traditional in Quebec after midnight mass. It was a right whoop up: The Cinqaunte and Ex flowed; so did the Canadian Club highballs. Oysters on the half-shell, viandes without number, desserts and music -- happy families packing calories against the cold. (Christmas Eve was a day of both fasting and abstinence -- no snacking between meals, no meat.) The tiny Anglo population in our town woke early for stockings and shortbread and Santa, rested and refreshed, except for the Dads who crashed at four a.m. after hours of dollhouse wrangling. Our French Canadian neighbors slept in later, checked out the cadeaux Pere Noel had left, and rested up for le Jour de L'an -- New Year's Day, which remains the true Quebec family holiday. But I’m willing to bet the contents of my stocking that they were eating at two a.m. what we’d polished off at suppertime: that sublime carb-and-pork antifreeze called tourtiere.

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Tourtiere is a double-crust ground pork pie -- and it's my vote for the national dish of French Canada, not just because you can find mass-produced versions in any frozen food aisle or bakery counter, but because it’s such an old dish. The seasoning -- that whiff of allspice, nutmeg and clove -- testifies to its seventeenth-century origins, the age of the first great push of Norman and Breton settlers to Voltaire’s "few acres of snow." These immigrants brought with them the heady spices of the late Renaissance cooking, flavors we associate with eggnog. French chefs in the eighteenth century began to play with the herbs we use in modern French cooking, but in far-away Quebec, the seasoning for tourtiere changed little. I'm not saying that tourtiere tastes or smells like a porky pumpkin pie: there's the mere hint of nutmeg and clove that can't compete with the onion, and that pinch of sauriette (savory, winter or summer) that flourishes on farms and in kitchen gardens all over Quebec.

There's argument about the etymology of tourtiere: some say it refers to a French meat pie made from a dove-like bird called a toutre, a pigeon so witless and slow it begged to be massacred along with its dim extended family. Others trace the dish to the old iron cooking vessel of the same name: a tourtiere hunched on the hearth on short legs and had a heavy concave lid, into which coals were poured -- our New England brethren would have called it a spider. There are regional recipes and traditions too: the tourtieres of Lac St. Jean or the Mauricie or Quebec City may differ in big ways, like using chunks of game instead of pork mince, or including ground beef and veal. Quebec City’s ancient tourtiere was thickened with oatmeal, not potatoes, the culinary legacy of the Highland regiments who stayed on in Quebec City after 1759, marrying the local desmoiselles and producing descendents who rejoice in names like Jean-Marie MacDuff, the boss machine tender on number three machine at the CIP newsprint mill in Trois-Rivieres.

Julian Armstrong, in her 2001 book, A Taste of Quebec explores these variations for the filling:

Tourtiere de Quebec: straightforward ground pork, onions and aromatics, with the aforementioned oatmeal.

Tourtiere de Charlevoix: One inch chunks of pork, beef and potatoes.

Tourtiere Leboutiller from the Gaspe – two to one ratio ground beef to ground pork.

Tourtiere de Fleur-Ange, from the Laurentides: ground pork once again, but a cup and a half of celery and celery leaves and: Tabernacle! -- a half cup of parsley -- a renegade tourtiere for vegetarians. In truth, things green and leafy were items conspicuous in their absence at la table de Noel -- the vegetable accompaniments to tourtiere were as traditional as the sides at Thanksgiving: pickled beets (store-bought -- we ate them once a year) baked beans (I pimp a can of Campbell’s these days like any traveling pit master) and a big dish of chowchow or piccalilli.

Some fine modern cooks may roll the crust from puff pastry, pate brise or phyllo, for all I know. It's tempting to fiddle with the filling: my mother bought a caribou and cranberry version from a fine charcutier last year. There’s nothing the matter with these tourtieres nouvelles, but they’re the products of professionals with too much time on their hands. Tout le monde understands that a tourtiere is a bland pork pie, encased in pale flaky pastry made with vegetable shortening or lard, cut in with a pastry blender or subjected to the gentle frottage of deux mains.

Last December my daughter Honor called from Los Angeles, mildly bummed by her first balmy Christmas -- there's something so wrong about stringing lights on palm trees. But she made me dictate my mother's tourtiere recipe, so she could duplicate her traditional Christmas Eve dinner for some in-laws. When I asked her how it turned out during our Christmas Day chat, she sounded discouraged.

"Well, it kinda stank. My pastry was hard and tough (too much water, I thought – she’s a novice pastry chef) and it all looked grey and depressing. The crust never got really brown. The beans were good, though."

Well, my tourtiere never browned up nicely either, though decades in the kitchen guarantee me a flaky crust. I was thinking of the box office suicide of Honor's LA tourtiere when I dragged the November/December 1986 issue of "The Pleasures of Cooking" from its hallowed sticky stack. Jehane Benoit, "the Canadian Julia Child" and a medical student in 1920s Paris of Edouard de Pomiane, wrote about "The Night Before Christmas in Quebec." Tourtiere, of course. A golden-crusted beauty. The filling was straightforward: ground pork, grated potato and onion, big pinch of clove. But what rocked me was the pastry recipe: boiling water, baking powder, lemon juice, an egg -- all whizzed about in the Cuisinart along with the salt and the flour. Could it be edible?

Remembering her chapter in Christmas Memories With Recipes (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988) I checked out the recipe for the crust. She uses a pastry blender for the crust, and ice water. The leavening is there: baking soda this time, and the lemon juice. She tosses in a quarter teaspoon of savory -- sure, why not? Her method may be conventional in this version but one ingredient sure isn't: "A pinch of turmeric?"

A pinch of turmeric wasn't going to add a whole lot of flavor, so this must have been Mme. Benoit's cagey solution to my daughter's dismal grey dilemma. Genius.

Presented with a pastry recipe as counterintuitive as the one in "Pleasures of Cooking," not to mention a set of whacky ingredients, I decided to push the tourtiere season up a couple of weeks. I had a lovely tub of lard in the fridge (the supermercado down the road renders its owns -- no hydrogenation happening here), a Penzey's a few miles away to provide a fresh stash of savory, and a pound and a half of ground pork.

I prepared the filling and placed it in the freezer to cool. Then I assembled my pastry mise-en-place -- instead of my faithful four ingredients (flour, salt, lard, water), I found I'd acquired ten. I whizzed the dry ingredients in the Cuisinart, then pulsed in two-thirds of the lard. I added the rest of the lard, a teaspoon of lemon juice and a beaten egg to a third of a cup of boiling water and stirred well. Madame said "With the motor running, add to the flour mixture and turn off the motor immediately. The dough will be soft."

It was as shiny and soft as a baby's bottom, if the bottom in question had picked up a faint glisten from a turmeric self-tanner. I diapered it in Glad Wrap and tucked it into the fridge for a four-hour nap.

It rolled out like a dream -- I'd been afraid that its very suppleness would make for a scrappy, pieced together crust. I peeked into the oven after twenty minutes or so: the baking powder was doing its magic and the crust had puffed. When I pulled it from the oven, it glowed like the gams of a Brazilian supermodel.

I nabbed a nibble of the crust while I stirred the beans. Flaky it was not, but I'd known from the get-go that the boiling water would nix all possibility of flakes. Tender and crispy it was, sturdy enough to stand up to the filling and melting on the tongue -- it would be excellent for Cornish pasties or empanadas. Had I not made it myself, the flavor would have seemed mildly mysterious: meaty from the lard, a touch of tin (in a good way!) from the turmeric -- or maybe the lemon -- and savory from the savory.

Merci, chere Mme. Benoit, We from Chicago and the kids from Los Angeles are meeting at my parents' home in Ottawa this Christmas. I'll tote along the recipe with the Christmas presents, so Honor and I can make tourtiere together.

In my childhood neighborhood, every back yard, including ours, was glazed into a skating rink. Every school had a professional set up: lines, boards, center ice. Trois-Rivieres owned the farm team for the Montreal Canadiens; gods like Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau and Boom Boom Geoffrion had walked among us. As their parents partied on, serious boys tested out their new skates, a present from Grandmaman they'd begged to open early. No lights except the stars; no roughing, no slashing, no fighting, no high-sticking.

I like to think that my hoped-for grandchild will place a funky French Canadian pork pie on her Christmas Eve table, next to her paternal grandmother's spring rolls. But what she won't hear is the Christmas morning lullaby that once escorted me to dreamland: no singing, no talking. Just the icy slice of sharp new blades fueled by tourtiere, and the thwack thwack thwack of the puck against the boards.

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Tourtiere Belle Femme

Filling: Marilyn McArthur/Jehane Benoit Hybrid

1-1/2 lbs. ground pork

2 medium potatoes, grated

1 small onion, grated or chopped molecularly fine

1/2 t salt

1/4 t ground clove, or to taste

1/2 t savory

Pinch of nutmeg

Pinch of celery salt

1/2 C water

Combine the ingredients in a medium frying pan and cook for about thirty minutes. Grey the meat, do not brown it. Chunk up the pork with a spatula: you don’t want lumps, you want a fine uniform mix. Stick in the fridge to cool off -- room temperature minimum.

Pastry: Patched from two recipes by Jehane Benoit

2 C all purpose flour

1-1/2 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

1/4 t celery salt

1/2 t savory

1-1/2 t lemon juice

1/4 t turmeric

1 large egg, beaten

5-1/3 oz (150 g) lard, cut into pieces

1/2 C boiling water

In a food processor, pulse the dry ingredients, herbs and spices until combined. Add 2/3 of the lard and pulse until it resembles coarse crumbs -- about 8 pulses. Add the remaining lard to the boiling water off the stove -- stir until melted. Beat in the lemon juice and egg. With the motor running, add to the flour mixture and turn off immediately. Knead briefly on a floured surface, wrap and refrigerate for at least four hours.

Roll out the bottom crust in a standard pie pan, preferably Pyrex. Smooth in the pork filling, spread the top crust thereon. Slash, decorate, and bake in a 350 oven for 35 to 45 minutes. Remove when the pastry is puffed slightly, golden and crispy. Let stand for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Joyeux Noel.

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Margaret McArthur, aka maggiethecat, is host and Dark Lady of the Daily Gullet Competition forum. She writes, cooks and tends her garden near Chicago.

The Daily Gullet is proud to present an excerpt from Society member Chad Ward's new book, An Edge in the Kitchen.

Common Knife Myths

Let's deal with the three biggest myths and misconceptions about
quality knives: forging, bolsters and full tangs, or the Historical Fiction,
the Convenient Fiction and the Outright Lie.

Stamp of Approval

Nearly every piece of advice that involves knives contains some variation
on the idea that forged knives are superior to stamped knives, conjuring
up images of a burly artisan lovingly whacking a glowing bar of steel
into your soon-to-be-purchased knife. Conversely, stamped knives are presented
as being punched, cookie cutter style, out of thin, cheap steel. Old World
hand craftsmanship versus crass automated garbage.

The real world is not that simple. If you compare a $100 forged knife
from the gourmet boutique to the stamped knife you picked up at the grocery
store in an emergency, forged knives do come out way ahead. But that's
about the only time the myth is true. The fact is that in a modern manufacturing
facility stamped knives aren't really stamped and forged knives
aren't really forged, at least in the way we normally think of those
terms.

But wait, you say, I've read that forging aligns the molecules
of the steel and makes it stronger. It also refines the grain structure,
making for better steel. Forged knives are heavier, and that's better,
right? And they have that bolster for balance and safety, you cry. Stamped
knives are flimsy and icky.

First, a little terminology.

For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to dismiss the cheapo
stamped knives. There is a sea of stamped knives out there. Some are decent
knives, some are garbage, but they are, in fact, made by punching a knife
shape out of a flat sheet of steel and putting a simple edge on it. They
tend to be very inexpensive and very light. Some have such a low carbon
content that they will never take or hold a working edge. Their handles
are usually molded plastic and they never have bolsters. For the most
part, you can ignore them. There is one inexpensive stamped knife that
I like a lot for starter kitchens and we will discuss it when we get to
that section. The rest aren't worth bothering with, even the ones
from reputable manufacturers who have gotten into the low-end market.
Later on we'll take a look at the warning signs so you know what
to avoid.

The knives we're really talking about here have been taking the
professional cooking world by storm for the last several years and they
are starting to make headway into the home market. You may have seen knives
by Global or MAC infiltrating your local Gourmet Hut. They are good examples
of this new type of knife. The blades are cut and precision ground from
a billet of high-alloy steel, a method that custom knife makers refer
to as stock removal. They are indeed laser cut or punched from a sheet
or thin bar of steel, but the level of finish that goes into them is equal
to any of the forged knives. Indeed, the manufacturing process is nearly
identical. I think of them as machined knives to distinguish them from
stamped knives. Professional chefs have been abandoning their heavy, forged
knives (and repetitive stress injuries) in droves for this style of knife.

Bring on the Heat

The method of shaping the blade of a quality modern chef's knife
is largely irrelevant. Why? Heat treatment. Take two pieces of the same
steel. Grind one to a given shape and forge the other into the same shape.
At this point in the process, forging does impart all of those wondrous
virtues you've read about. There is a difference in the internal
structure of the two knives, and the forged blade is indeed better. Sounds
pretty good so far, doesn't it? But we still have a ways to go before
we have a finished knife. Any difference between the two chunks of steel
is wiped out in the next step -- heat treatment, one of the most
important aspects of creating a quality knife.

Heat treatment? Is that some kind of spa bath for your knife blade? Well,
sorta. And as it turns out, it's all about the heat, baby. Give
those two knife blades the same heat treatment and the steel will be identical.
You wouldn't be able to tell them apart unless you have a scanning
electron microscope in your kitchen . Since they have the same shape,
they function exactly the same. One method takes a steel blank and grinds
away everything that doesn't look like a knife. The other takes
a steel blank, heats it up and squishes it into the shape of a knife.
Once they have been heat treated, that's the only practical difference.

Here's how it works. Knife steel is deliberately left soft during
most of its manufacturing. It's easier to shape, cut and grind that
way. One of the last steps before the steel blank gets fluffed and buffed
into a real knife is a soak somewhere between 1400 and 1900 degrees Fahrenheit,
which causes a radical change in the crystal structure of the steel. When
cooled rapidly -- quenched -- the crystal structure changes
again, creating an extremely hard, very brittle steel. It is under enormous
internal strain. Think 14 cups of coffee and an impending mortgage payment.
That kind of pressure. Ready to shatter at the slightest provocation.

The knife blank is then heated again to a much lower temperature, somewhere
between 400 and 700 degrees Fahrenheit, to ease some of the internal strain
a little, making the steel slightly softer (though still much harder than
it was initially) and a lot less brittle. At this point, all of those
internal changes have wiped the atomic Etch-A-Sketch clean. Any advantages
of the forged knife have been erased. And that's if the two knives
started out from the same steel. As we'll see, some modern stamped
knives take advantage of seriously vicious high-tech alloys.

Where does this idea of creating a superior blade by forging come from?
For centuries forging wasn't just a way to make better steel, it
was the only way to make steel at all. That's why I refer to this
myth as the Historical Fiction. But now knife makers no longer have to
melt their own iron ore and pound it into submission. They simply call
the steel mill and order up a batch. There is some great steel out there
now, better than anything ever before used for kitchen knives. It can
be drop forged or it can be laser cut out of sheets. With proper heat
treatment, the method of shaping the blade has more to do with manufacturing
processes and knife styles than anything else.

So why all the hype about forged knives? It's a great way to sell
knives, for one thing. For another, the forging process is more labor
intensive and expensive. No one is going to go to that much trouble to
make a lousy knife. Forged knives are good, they're just not inherently
better. At least not better than the modern crop of machined knives out
there. That's where the myth falls down. As I said before, if you
compare a $100 forged knife with a cheap grocery store knife, the forged
knife wins. No contest. Put that same forged knife up against a similarly
priced knife ground from a billet of modern ubersteel and properly heat
treated and you've got an entirely different outcome. There is no
clear winner. Each method can produce great knives, but they are knives
with wildly different characteristics. You've got a choice to make.

Forged versus Stamped Round 2: The Real Story

Forged knives and machined knives tend to be made in two distinctive
styles. The forged knife generally will be thicker and heavier. This can
be a good thing or not depending on what kind of cooking you do. Many
cooks like a heavy knife. The machined knife will be thinner and lighter.

The forged knife will generally have softer steel. Soft is a relative
term when you are talking about steel. It is steel, after all, but it
hasn't been heat treated to optimal hardness. The softer steel easily
can be resharpened at home, but won't hold an edge as long or take
as acute an edge as harder steel. The machined knife will generally have
harder steel. It will take an extremely keen edge and hold it for a good
long time. It will be more difficult to resharpen (unless you read my
chapter on sharpening your knives).

The forged knife will have a heavy bolster, the collar of metal between
the handle and the blade. The bolster will probably extend most or all
of the way down to the heel of the knife. The machined knife may or may
not have a bolster. If it does, the bolster will have been welded on rather
than being forged into shape. Either knife may or may not have a full
tang. We'll get to tangs and bolsters in just a minute.

So it's really more a matter of style and feel rather than quality.
Some chefs like a heavier knife with a thicker blade, the type of knife
that has been in vogue, at least in Europe and countries influenced by
European (read French) cooking, for a couple of hundred years. Other cooks
like a thinner, lighter knife that feels more nimble in the hands and
doesn't leave them feeling like they've been powerlifting
all afternoon. This style of knife is heavily influenced by Japanese knives,
known for their light weight, hard steel and screaming sharp edges.

The truth of the matter is that unless you are in a production kitchen
(where you're likely to be handed whatever knife was on sale when
the kitchen was equipped), it comes down to a matter of feel. Remember,
we're not dedicated to having knives that are all alike. We can
mix and match. Make your decision based on what feels right in your hands,
in your kitchen and on your wallet rather than any fictional virtues of
a particular manufacturing process.

Speaking of fiction . . .

Bolster BS

The traditional argument is that the bolster, the thick collar between
the blade and handle, adds weight and balances the knife. Both of those
things are true. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on how
you like to use your knife. The idea is to put a little weight behind
your fingers when you grip the knife with a chef's pinch grip. The
bolster, combined with the weight of the tang and handle material, counterbalances
the weight of the blade. I happen to like my knives to be a little blade
heavy, so a bolstered knife that shifts too much weight behind my fingers
feels awkward and slightly out of control. It's all a matter of
feel and preference. A bolster does provide a nice transition point and
can help keep moisture and crud from getting into the handle.

Contrary to the marketing brochures and the oh-so-helpful display down
at the Towels'n'Such ("full bolster for safety!"),
the bolster is not a finger guard, at least not on a chef's knife.
Any knife with the blade heel lower than the handle has just as much protection
for your fingers as a bolstered knife. The bolster does not prevent your
hand from slipping forward onto the blade, the difference between the
blade height and handle does that. The term butchers use is "stubbing."
That's when the tip of your knife hits something hard, forcing it
to a sudden stop and causing your hand to slide forward onto the blade.
You can cut yourself badly this way. However, it is really only a problem
on knives with blades the same width as the handle or narrower --
a boning knife, for example. That style of knife does need some sort of
extension below the handle as a safety feature. A chef's knife,
though, has a blade significantly taller than the handle. Stubbing is
nearly impossible. A chef's knife does not need a bolster, especially
not one that extends down to the heel. That style of bolster will either
keep you from using the full length of your knife's edge or lead
to the premature death of your knife.

The bolster is -- or at least used to be -- the sign of a forged knife,
which leads us back to the "stamped versus forged" argument
above. Nowadays, stamped knives are just as likely to have bolsters welded
on because that's what the marketing department and the general public
thinks a knife should look like. To be fair, a bolster does add an element
of polish and finesse to the look of a knife. In fact, if a manufacturer
makes more than one line of knife -- a budget line and a luxury line,
for example -- they will frequently put bolsters on the higher end knives
as a way to distinguish them from the cheaper knives. Bolsters add heft
and a certain gravitas to things. Like a cummerbund.

In addition to everything that the bolster doesn't do, what a bolster
does indisputably do is make sharpening your knives a serious pain in
the butt. If you've seen a chef's knife that has been sharpened
on an electric sharpener for any length of time, you'll notice a
scooped out area just forward of the heel that keeps the knife edge from
sitting flat on the cutting board. It also keeps you from using the heel
of the knife effectively. The same thing happens with any sharpening method,
it's just generally more obvious with electric sharpeners . The
collar itself is not the problem, but when the bolster extends down the
back portion of the knife toward the heel it causes the edge to ride up
during sharpening, changing the angle. Do this long enough and you'll
dish out a portion of the edge just forward of the heel and whole lot
of metal will have to be removed to get your knife back into serviceable
shape. At least one manufacturer of high end forged cutlery, Chef's
Choice, grinds its bolsters flat at the heel for this very reason. Wusthof
and Messermeister both offer lines of knives with the bolster only extending
partway down the blade back. Most machined knives either don't have
bolsters or only have a collar between the handle and blade. Either type
makes the knife much easier to sharpen. These are the only kinds of bolster
I can recommend in good conscience.

The myth of the bolster is a Convenient Fiction. Call it a feature and
claim it's a sign of quality. Clever. Luckily most professional
knife sharpeners offer a bolster reduction service. Think of it as liposuction
for your knives. It puts them back in fighting trim so they can be sharpened
and used to their full potential.

And now to the Outright Lie . . .

Sharp and Tangy

The tang is the tongue of metal that extends from the blade backwards.
It is where the handle is attached. A full tang is the same size and shape
as the handle slabs and is sandwiched between them. In direct contradiction
to nearly 9,000 years of metal knife and sword making, many knife manufacturers
claim that you absolutely must have a full tang for your knife to be any
good. You don't. A full tang is pretty, but hardly necessary, especially
not in the kitchen.

Let's look at this logically. Metal is expensive and hard to work.
You don't waste it and you don't pound it more than you have
to, at least you don't when you don't have power tools. That's
why knives and swords from the justly famous Japanese katana to the Viking
scramasax to the American Bowie knife had stick tangs or rattail tangs
hidden inside the handle. These are hard use blades, designed to cut through
rope, leather, armored people and just about anything or anyone that needed
cutting. The tang was a place to attach a handle. As long as it was long
enough to provide proper leverage, it was fine. Same with your chef's
knife.

In fact, it wasn't until after World War I that a full tang and
slab handles even became practical, much less desirable in the kitchen.
Stainless steel was introduced in England in 1914 , but it took several
years to work the kinks out (well, that and there was that pesky World
War to deal with). Until that time, and for quite a while afterward, knife
blades were made of carbon steel. Carbon steel rusts and corrodes readily.
The last thing you want is a way for moisture and goo to get inside the
handle. That's a big reason hidden tangs were de rigueur, there
was only one entrance point, the juncture between the blade and handle.
A full tang with riveted handles provides the equivalent of valet parking
all the way around the perimeter of the handle for crud to work its way
between the tang and slabs. In fact, there is a school of thought that
says the modern, injection molded handle with a hidden tang is more sanitary
for this very reason.

Unless you are planning to jack up your car or
pry open doors with your chef's knife, the tang plays little or no role
in its strength and durability. It does help establish the balance and
feel of the knife, but as we discussed with bolsters, there are many ways
to balance the knife. With modern manufacturing methods it is inexpensive
to place riveted handle slabs on a full tang. A full tang is a manufacturing
choice and a stylistic choice. If you like them, great, have at it. Just
keep in mind that any reasonably sized tang that extends at least two
thirds of the way into the handle will be fine.

If you insist on a full tang, you'll miss out on
a huge array of truly spectacular knives. Want to spend a couple of thousand
dollars on a custom made Japanese yanagiba (sashimi knife) hand forged
by a master craftsman with a 700 year history of knife making behind him?
Oops, can't do it, the yanagiba has a stick tang. Want a reasonably priced
chef's knife that won't expire if it finds its way into the dishwasher
every once in a while. Sorry. Hidden tang. You're out of luck.

The tang should be pretty far down on your list
of things to look for when choosing a knife or two to outfit your kitchen.

It might seem like I don't like traditional forged,
bolstered, full tang knives. Not true at all. I like them very much. What
I don't like is half truths that mislead the buying public into thinking
that because those features are part of a quality knife, that all quality
knives must have those features. That's like saying that because some
of the finest cars available are convertibles, any car that isn't a convertible
must be inferior. The argument just doesn't hold up. It's a big old world
out there. People's tastes and needs are different.

Full tangs became popular during the Industrial
Revolution when water or steam powered trip hammers and drop forges made
mass produced knives affordable. In New England in 1830, John Russell
put his fancy new machinery to work drop forging punched out hunting and
skinning knives for the booming westward expansion. Settlers could hardly
afford the expensive, hand forged hunting knives that were the standard
until then. Drop forges could quickly bang a knife shape out of a blank.
Powered machines punched holes in the tangs so that scale handles could
be attached, a more automated and cheaper method than attaching handles
to hidden tangs, which had to be done by skilled craftsmen.

Top to Bottom: Forged chef's knife with partial bolster, forged French knife
with older style ferrule bolster and modern machined chef's knife with welded
on bolster. (click on photo to englarge)

Full tang (click on photo to englarge)

Stick tang (click on photo to englarge)

+ + +

Chad Ward (aka Chad) has been a writer and cook for more than twenty years. He is the author of Knife Maintenance and Sharpening, one of the eGullet Culinary Institute's most popular courses.